variance

younghov17 · #1 10-10-2006, 06:59 AM

lately ive been thinking a lot about variance, specifically how do i know im a winning player and i havent just been running lucky. theoretically variance can swing 1 way or the other for an almost infinite number of hands. my career of 500 to 600k hands is small when u think of this way. ive been trying to think what seperates a winning player from a losing player or a marginal winner from a bigger winner. the difference between a regular and a 60/5 is obvious, but when comparing regulars to regulars are we all the same skill level just waiting for our turn to get lucky? how can any of us be sure that we are actually winners and not just running good?

Goldstone · #2 10-10-2006, 07:24 AM

500k is a lot of hands. If you are pulling in a decent win-rate over that sample size you have not just been running good. There is a confidence calculation formula that can help with this. It's somewhere on my PC, I'll see if I can find it.

Rotterdaum · #3 10-10-2006, 07:32 AM

hey, hov,

this is certainly a point worth discussing. AZK brought it up in tdomeski's thread in the HSNL forum and i've been thinking about it for a while too. In short my thoughts are such that I do believe that a lot of the more successful players are just those that are running better in the long run. Especially considering that some players' spectacular careers are only 200-300k hands, where they race from the lowest to the highest stakes and appear godly.

200-300k hands is not definitive at all. I absolutely think that at any given moment, right now, there are players who are running bad at all the key times (e.g. running good in small pots, running bad in big pots... running good at their normal stakes, actually running horrible when they try to move up) and are thus in a much different position than where they could be.

Also, zeejustin talked about "luck of learning" in his post in HSNL about what separates logical winners from "feel" winners. I've thought about that ever since I started playing poker too. This is a big part of variance. Some players are lucky in learning - they do right things, get rewarded by winning pots and not only learn quickly but move up quickly. Others do right things but get smacked in the face. This makes it hard to learn, move up, a is overall psychologically brutal. Imagine constantly losing, thkning about the game, coming up with improvements, implementing them, and eating dirt even more than previously

Dan BRIGHT · #4 10-10-2006, 07:35 AM

one way to look at it is if you play many hands in a similar fashion to other players who are likely to be winners.... you can sort of make an inductive argument there supporting the notion that you are a winner.

Sciolist · #5 10-10-2006, 07:48 AM

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one way to look at it is if you play many hands in a similar fashion to other players who are likely to be winners.... you can sort of make an inductive argument there supporting the notion that you are a winner.

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I think that's the ONLY way to do it. You have to see what losing players do and understand why they are losing. You have to see what winnings players do and understand why they are winning. You need to look at a lot of people to see this. In other words, you need to play a lot - dry analysis is tedious.

On a related note, it is my understanding that your current win rate, regardless of sample size, is more likely to be your TRUE win rate than any other. Of course, the total number of rates you could be at given n% confidence interval could be very high, so you can easily have a 0.1% chance of your long term rate being your current win rate and that rate is the one carrying the highest probability.

younghov17 · #6 10-10-2006, 07:52 AM

i have no idea what confidence interval is

Sciolist · #7 10-10-2006, 08:09 AM

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i have no idea what confidence interval is

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I Link

ArturiusX · #8 10-10-2006, 08:09 AM

Game selection is a huge huge huge factor here.

Sciolist · #9 10-10-2006, 08:12 AM

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Game selection is a huge huge huge factor here.

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Right, and you can never know what your true win rate is. You get better (or worse), the games get better (or worse), you start playing on different criterea, you play higher (or lower) etc. If the games were static and you had 10m hands at a specific limit against the same players, and none of you ever learnt, you could find out what your true win rate was with a high degree of confidence.

ArturiusX · #10 10-10-2006, 08:37 AM

My game selection is top of the line, and I never have a problem with variance too much, and my winrates always been good. Sample size? Probably, I'm not clocking 500k a year, but still a substantial amount. Who knows.