One typical player's progress (very, very long, boring)

[kazana]

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I am at the stage you were when you started NL, and am also playing a weak/tight game [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

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Ah, don't worry about being weak/tight. Continue to read a lot on the SSNL forum, and that'll change soon enough.

Post a few hands where you thought you went too far being aggressive. You'd be surprised at how rarely it'll happen that you'll be playing too aggressive.

[dr3amer]

Nice post. I would like to add one thing - beginners should not focus on the 6 months you have been playing so much as on the number of hands you have played. Not everyone can devote the same amount of time to poker and I don't want people to become overly optimistic if they play fewer hands than you have.

[kazana]

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I would like to add one thing - beginners should not focus on the 6 months you have been playing so much as on the number of hands you have played. Not everyone can devote the same amount of time to poker and I don't want people to become overly optimistic if they play fewer hands than you have.

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Thank you for pointing this out. Yes, that is very important indeed.

On the other hand, to take in information (learning, reading posts/books, thinking about the game away from the tables, etc.) and to understand the information takes time. So even if you plotted down 50k hands in 1 month, you'd likely be knowledgewise behind a player who played the 50k hands in 6 months. So time does matter, too.

However, the hands played combined with the winrate make the bankroll. The goal therefore is to improve your winrate (through studying the game) at an appropriate speed compared to your number of hands played.

To figure out where the optimal balance is, can be tricky. In my case, I've been spending about 1-2 hours a day on average reading posts/books and study in general. I have only increased the amount of hands I've played relatively recently, while I was still looking for a new job and my wife was cycling through europe. So, I had tons of time on my hands to play the game. I assume my winrate would have been quite a bit lower, though, if I hadn't spent that much time on learning the game previous to that.

[brizzology]

Hi Kazana, thanks for sharing this info with us, it's very useful for beginning players. Totally NOT boring.

I'm also 6 months into the game, although I have played fewer hands (somewhere around 30K I think). I'm also trying to evaluate my win rate, hourly rate, etc, and I've run into a question for which you or the others in this thread might have an answer.

How should rake and bonus fit into evaluating your win rate? I assume that your charts measured wins after rake, and they don't include bonus. Is that correct?

Here's why I ask. If I look at my bankroll after rake AND after bonus, it's growing at a healty rate (something like 6-8PTBB/100). That's mostly because I'm playing micro-limits (25NL, 50NL, and recently, 100NL; .5/1 LHE), and the bonus makes a HUGE difference in bankroll growth at these levels.

If I take away bonus, and keep rake in there, my hourly rate is damn small. In fact, if I were paying a B&M rake, rather than internet rake, I'd probably be a losing player! So, should I be concerned?

Should I remove bonus from my win rate and hourly rate calculations, and concentrate on those post-rake results? Or, is bonus something that should be included, just as rake is included, since both are a given part of the game? What's the best way to look at this, and what approach did you take in your charts?

[kazana]

[ QUOTE ]
Hi Kazana, thanks for sharing this info with us, it's very useful for beginning players. Totally NOT boring.

I'm also 6 months into the game, although I have played fewer hands (somewhere around 30K I think). I'm also trying to evaluate my win rate, hourly rate, etc, and I've run into a question for which you or the others in this thread might have an answer.

How should rake and bonus fit into evaluating your win rate? I assume that your charts measured wins after rake, and they don't include bonus. Is that correct?

Here's why I ask. If I look at my bankroll after rake AND after bonus, it's growing at a healty rate (something like 6-8PTBB/100). That's mostly because I'm playing micro-limits (25NL, 50NL, and recently, 100NL; .5/1 LHE), and the bonus makes a HUGE difference in bankroll growth at these levels.

If I take away bonus, and keep rake in there, my hourly rate is damn small. In fact, if I were paying a B&M rake, rather than internet rake, I'd probably be a losing player! So, should I be concerned?

Should I remove bonus from my win rate and hourly rate calculations, and concentrate on those post-rake results? Or, is bonus something that should be included, just as rake is included, since both are a given part of the game? What's the best way to look at this, and what approach did you take in your charts?

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Thanks for the props!
First off, being 6 months in the game, I don't think there's much (if anything) I could "teach" you. But I'll tell you what I think in regards to what you've asked.

Whether you include boni and/or rake is up to you. As long as you know what's part of your chart it should be fine. You can't fool yourself anyway. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

I personally don't include the boni neither do I subtract rake (or add rakeback). After all, I'm trying to track my "standard" winrate at playing poker - and rake is part of the game. Also, bonus isn't anywhere near constant, so adding that would skew the winrate.
I regard a bonus as exactly what the name suggests: A bonus on top of my regualar winnings. The same goes for rakeback.

The bonus + rakeback does indeed make a huge difference to the growth rate of my bankroll, too. I'd guess it adds up to about 4-6 BB/100. But the goal remains to be winning at poker, even without those extras.

If your current winrate is tiny without those, it's just an indicator that you're far away from where you could be - pokerwise. My winrate is okay, but I know it could be higher, and that I'm not running bad. So naturally, there must be a few areas in that I can (and need to) improve my game.

So the bottomline (yet again) is: If I keep learning, and keep improving my game and my clean winrate will improve. There's no doubt about that. The impact of bonus and rakeback will diminish as I move up in stakes, so I'd better focus on making up for that through better poker... [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Oh, and in regards to B&M rake & tips and so on: I haven't played a single hand of live poker, yet, so take this with a pound of salt. From what I gather, the live games are so much softer that it should be able to compensate for the increased costs of playing. I figure, the only true drawback is that you can't play that many hands per hour.

[brizzology]

No doubt, posts like yours are really helpful to other (relative) beginners, and one of the reasons why this forum is so useful.

Some people say that you must beat the players and the rake to be a profitable player. Following that logic, I guess you could include bonus as well, if you're interested in measuring your profits.

However, I agree with you -- measuring win rate without bonus OR rake is a good idea, especially if you are interested in knowing if you are strictly a winning player vs. your opponents.

How the heck do you get PT to do it?

When I run the monthly graphs similar to the one you posted, or when I examine my PTBB/100, PokerTracker seems to calculate winnings and losses post-rake. Is there a way to remove rake from the equation?

My other problem is that my PT database doesn't contain hand histories for Bodog, since it's not supported. So, I still refer to my own spreadsheet when I want to view total bankroll, total wins, etc. I don't have a great indication of rake paid at Bodog, though I could probably estimate, add it to the rake showing up in PT, and have a decent guess at my total wins.

I've heard the same thing about B&M softness making up for the added rake...hope that's the case when I finally get to play at one!

[kazana]

I don't worry about getting rake out of the graph. Neither do I know how to do that in PT.
I just take a look at the general stats and there you can see the exact amount of rake paid.
You can also calculate how much BB/100 rake accounts for.

Say you've won $400 over 15k hands at 25NL and you've paid a total of $450 rake.

Your winrate in PT will be about 5.3 BB/100 displayed as 10.6 PTBB/100 (since PT works with big bets instead of big blinds).

An easy way to calculate your rakefree winrate is obviously to just add rake to winnings:
Rakefree BB = ((Winnings + Rake) * 100 / Hands) / BigBet = (85000 / 15000) / .5 = 11.3

So your "penalty" in terms of BB/100 is 6 BB/100.
This is the term I like to look at when thinking of rake.

You can also directly calculate your penalty by using the numbers from PT and then just plugging it into this simple formula:
Penalty = PTBBper100 * Rake / (Winnings * 2) = (10.6 * 450) / (400 * 2) = 6 BB/100

[brizzology]

OK, I was wondering which PT option I was missing.

Yeah, I've got a pretty good idea of what my rake has been, although I don't have Bodog stats, since they don't got into PT and the rake information is very hard (nearly impossible) to figure out. But I can make a good guess, and it looks like rake accounts for a heck of a lot when playing at low/micro limits.

Hey, side question for you...are you still playing at 50NL? Seems like your bankroll + bonus may have grown to the point where you can play higher if you like, depending on what your BR requirements are for each level. Just curious...I'm around the same point, and started at 100NL.

[kazana]

I'm currently busy with the transition from 50 to 100.
My roll is pretty much at exactly 20 buyins.

I'm just not sure if my game is good enough, yet, although my stabs so far have been very profitable (27BB/100 - sustainable? [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img] ).

I'll just gradually shift up there, for now only sitting at really good tables.
At 50 I just about play any table as long as it's not got an avg VPIP < 25 or 3+ shorties.

I downloaded sixth sense to give it a shot and see if it helps my table selection. So that might have a significant impact.

At which sites do you play? I play mainly (actually almost exclusively) at FTP.
Would be cool if we could shadow each other and comment on our play every now and again. A kind of learning buddy.

PM me if you're interested.

[DeuceSeven]

I was actually thinking of posting a thread like this. I'm about 2 months ahead of OP. I originally ran hot playing NL25 and SNGs. Then my lack of skill caused me to lose half of my initial $450 deposit. I then deposited $100 and moved down to microlimit NL at pokerstars and eventually found that I could play limit really well and that I really enjoy mtts.

So I decided to play limit cash games to raise money for mtts and so far I've deposited $550 and have grown that to $660. So far after 2200 hands I'm earning 7bb/100 hands in .25/.50 2 tabling full ring tables, with rakeback and bonus whoring I'm earning about 8bb/100 hands.

It's amazing at how the players at .25/.50 play as good, if not better then B&M 3/6. Now I'm contemplating whether I should switch to NL as I feel my hand reading is really good , at least at the micro level.

For now I think I'll stay with limit as I can play it mechanically, which is good since I'm usually tired after working 50 hours a week.