profits compared to bad beats

ironlion69 · #1 10-24-2007, 02:10 PM

hey, just recently moved up to 25nl a couple of days ago and Ive been doing alright for my first 1500 hands. My ptbb/100 is 6.21 but i know it could be a lot higher. Anyway, I have a question about poker in general. Can you expect your profits to be higher then the amount of money you lose on your bad beats? I know I have a tiny sample size of 1500 hands, but I have incurred at least $200 of losses because of straight bad beats (meaning that if i would have won all the hands i should have won,i would have $200 more dollars in my account). My profit over these 1500 hands is around $45. I know bad beats are a part of the game especially at these limits, I'm just wondering if in the long run I can expect to have more of a profit then the amount of money I'm losing due to bad beats. Thanks

Khaos4k · #2 10-24-2007, 02:26 PM

1500 hands is way too small of a sample.

PJo336 · #3 10-24-2007, 02:28 PM

Over time it will even out more, although it would take millions and millions of hands for it to get so close you wouldnt notice it as much. The point to be made is that while you lose 200 dollars to bad beats, you also probably gain near that amount giving bad beats to others

ironlion69 · #4 10-24-2007, 02:32 PM

I know 1500 hands is a very small sample, I'm just wondering if you can expect to make more profits then the amount of money you lose in bad beats in the long run.

pzhon · #5 10-24-2007, 03:07 PM

[ QUOTE ]
Ive been doing alright for my first 1500 hands. My ptbb/100 is 6.21

[/ QUOTE ]
Giving that much precision after only 1500 hands is misleading. If your standard deviation is a typical 40 PTBB/100, then after 1500 hands, the standard deviation of your observed win rate is 10.3 PTBB/100, so a rough 95% confidence interval would be from -14 to 27 PTBB/100. At this point, your results alone mean very little.

[ QUOTE ]
if i would have won all the hands i should have won,i would have $200 more dollars in my account).

[/ QUOTE ]
It's a very unhealthy attitude to say that you deserve to win when you get your money in while a favorite. This clouds many poker players' judgements, causing them to misplay (such as by overvaluing low pairs), to tilt, and to bore people with bad beat stories, and it's mathematically wrong.

When you have AA against KK, and all of the money goes in preflop, you don't deserve to win the whole pot. Since you win about 82% and lose about 18%, you expect to gain about 82%-18% = 64% of a stack, on average. When you win the whole pot, over 1/3 of your gains are due to luck, and this doesn't even count how lucky it was get AA against KK. If you lose, it wasn't 2 buy-ins of bad luck, only about 1.64 buy-ins of bad luck, following the good luck of getting AA against KK.

It's all part of the game.

[ QUOTE ]
I'm just wondering if in the long run I can expect to have more of a profit then the amount of money I'm losing due to bad beats.

[/ QUOTE ]
It depends on your playing style, and it's not a particularly meaningful question.

Some playing styles will tend to give many more bad beats than others. Doyle Brunson talks about this in the NLHE section of Super System. Due to his aggression with draws, he picks up a lot of pots with the worst hand. When he gets called, sometimes he has a big hand, but usually someone has a big hand while he has a draw. Brunson claims that the small pots he wins more than make up for the times he gets all-in with the worst hand.

It's possible that when Brunson played with the style he describes, that he gives many more bad beats than he gets. Nevertheless, he won a lot with it.

In the long run, your good luck and bad luck will both be large, and they will roughly cancel out. Your long term results are dominated by the advantage you have over your opponents.

ironlion69 · #6 10-24-2007, 03:43 PM

thanks for the post. I prob shouldnt have included all my stats, because I know they are meaningless. I just included it for an example. I do understand that bad beats are a part of the game and theres no way to stop it. I just wanted to know in general if you can expect your profits to be higher then the amount of money you lose due to bad beats in the long run.