Variance

[PokerBob]

Gabe,
excellent post.
your phone is gay.

[Josh W]

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At the time of, and immedately following the second downswing I would have told you I was playing my A game. This was certainly not the case. My game suffered tremendously from those downers and it took a long time to restore/improve my game.

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This is a great point and I really can't see how this isn't true for most people.

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Absolutely. I think somebody could probably even dig up BBV posts of mine where I claimed I hadn't tilted at all. At the time, I thought it was true. But then, I went over sooo many of my old hands. I lost sooooo much money with KK that I started to miss easy valuebets on the river, played to weak in general, missed checkraises, etc.

At the time, I swore I wasn't tilting. But even though I wasn't "steaming", I was definitely tilting.

Josh

[cartman]

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It's a meaningfull difference between risking 500 to get 4000bb/year and risking 2000 to get 1000/year.

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Peter,

I'm not sure what you mean by this part. Can you (or anyone else) elaborate upon or clarify this?

Thanks,
Cartman

[James282]

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It's a meaningfull difference between risking 500 to get 4000bb/year and risking 2000 to get 1000/year.

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Peter,

I'm not sure what you mean by this part. Can you (or anyone else) elaborate upon or clarify this?

Thanks,
Cartman

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Looks like potential downswings vs. yearly potential earn given two different scenarios.

James

[sweetjazz]

Dean, I have played about 500K hands of limit HE online lifetime, though I have never played above 30/60 except for <1K hands in some really soft games. In fact, I have played primarily 5/10 - 20/40 limits. My worst downswing was 420BB, and that was in November at 30/60 6max.

Here's the thing: if you are playing in a game where your edge is > 2 BB/100, it should be pretty rare to hit 500+ BB downswings. That's not to say that they won't happen, and indeed it is likely that some players in this category
will hit them, but it will be a minority. I attribute most of my lack of a severe downswing to playing in very soft games, so soft that they make up for my weaknesses as a player and still allow me a comfortable expectation. I also am fortunate, because even with this good game selection, I could easily have had worse downswings.

But it's very hard to win 2BB/100 or better at higher stakes games. The soft games where you can achieve this winrate (and certainly there are times when you have a theoretical edge > 2BB/100 at certain high stakes tables) don't run very frequently. And as your theoretical winrate decreases, the size of downswings increases very fast. Depending on what assumptions you make, I think a 1 BB/100 winner should expect to experience ~500BB downswings on a fairly frequent basis (probably about once per 100K hands), and sometimes those will collide against each and produce a really big downer.

If you think you can win 2BB/100 in the 100/200 game longterm playing on a fairly regular basis, I think you are probably kidding yourself. This is not based on your specific abilities (which I don't know), but the fact that such judgments come from either being one of the greatest LHE players in the world or from being a very good player who has run above average to date. It's much more likely (without knowing anything about you) that it's the latter.

[The Funky Llama]

two related comments:

1) my understanding is that the likelihood of having a downswing of X BB increases exponentially as your winrate decreases. Can any math guys confirm or deny this?

2) I think a lot of people are overestimating what sort of winrates are possible in the high stakes stars games.

[ggbman]

Your first and point is correct, and i am confident that your second assumption is too.

[Justin A]

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two related comments:

1) my understanding is that the likelihood of having a downswing of X BB increases exponentially as your winrate decreases. Can any math guys confirm or deny this?

2) I think a lot of people are overestimating what sort of winrates are possible in the high stakes stars games.

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I'm not sure if exponentially is the right term, but it's certainly not linear so the point you're trying to make holds.

[SA125]

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I hope this makes sense.

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Makes perfect sense, as I hope this does. I'm results oriented in poker in one way and not in another.

When I get my money in with the best of it and lose the pot, or make a good fold that would have won, I know the right play was made regardless.

But when I'm playing in a game and find myself losing constantly over an extended period of time, I take a hard look at it. When I feel that I had an edge in the game and should've won, my conclusion has always been that I'm either over estimating my edge, running ridiculously bad, being cheated, or some combination of whatever. Bottom line is I quit the game because the results say I'm a losing player in it and it's hard to argue with the record. I've done it. GL.

Steve

[Victor]

"1) my understanding is that the likelihood of having a downswing of X BB increases exponentially as your winrate decreases. Can any math guys confirm or deny this?"

playing with the numbers on the website ggbman linked (http://www.reviewpokerrooms.com/poke...uirements.html) it seems that it is close enough to linear for reasonable winrates. heres the numbers i plugged in.

bb/100..roll
0.25....1941
0.5.....970
1.......485
1.5.....323
2.......243
3.......162
4.......121

i used 5% risk of ruin.