Why You Shouldnt Play HUSNG with 20 Buyins

[TNixon]

Guess I better include my standard disclaimer. I firmly believe 20 is way too many when trying to quickly and agressively build a roll (and have shown in the past that it can make as much as a 3x difference in your final bankroll over 1k games, while buying *very little* extra bust security), but once you get past that phase, 20 is certainly not enough, especially if you're paying bills out of your roll.

[jay_shark]

Your goal in poker is to maximize your long term profits and not to minimize your risk of busting out . So as Tnixon pointed out ( we agree this time? ) , it can be detrimental to your long term profits if you wait too long to move up in limits .

[TNixon]

I think the only part we disagree on is what "too long" means.

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[Nichomacheo]

You math guys tend to ignore psychology too much.

[jay_shark]

[ QUOTE ]
You math guys tend to ignore psychology too much.

[/ QUOTE ]

Nicho , you should post this topic in the probability forum if you'd like . They wouldn't take you seriously if you suggest having 50 buy-ins for heads up sng's . In fact , you would get flamed for it .

[TNixon]

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You math guys tend to ignore psychology too much.

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Maybe. But in all my previous posts on the topic of bankroll building (and there have been some whoppers), I have actually tried really hard to take psychology, and even learning periods into account, or at the very least clearly point out that I was purely presenting a statistical view of things.

It is really hard to quantify things like "tilt", "confidence", and "comfort" though. All you can do is mention that they do have some (potentially very large) effect.

[daveT]

I take responsibility for re-opening this wound.

Here is the breakdown for other games.

FRlimit: 300BB
6max limit: 800 BB
NL FR 15-20 bi
NL 6 max 25 bi
STT: 50 bi
MTT: 100 bi

This DOES include times you tilt, it DOES include times that you run bad, this is all registered under "normalcy."

We all know that there is a place that the unfortunate 5% experience. If you look at the HSL forum, you will see a post by Hobb that shows how he experienced more than a 1000 BB downswing. It is unusual for a winning player to go through 200K hand break-even streaks, but it does happen. We would say to a newbie, that you are "probably" not a winning player, but that thread, and experiences by other's, shows that it can happen.

I wrote a post in the LC forum if you haven't read it addressing "what is normal." Are my experiences able to be filed under "normalcy." If they are then I don't need to change anything. If they are not, then I am either running bad (improbable) or playing bad (more likely). I think that it is important to know this for my own sake.

So, I asked, what have people ACTUALLY DONE to build their rolls. I admit that I am under-rolled, and that I am attempting to balance aggressive building with an acceptable ROR. I, historically, have always taken about 5%, which is considered too much by many people.

Have I ever experience an abnormal swing? I attempted to play 6max limit, and dropped over 600 BB in three days. Is it normal to run at -15BB/100? Absolutely not. I know that I played better than that. At LEAST break-even, for crying out loud.

Things that I also don't know. Does a LAG or TAG style add to swings in a SNG? I know that in FR Limit, I took constant, but very small, swings, but I was not playing LAG.

The thing I am trying to figure out, is how to think about normalcy. If I am playing a game I am familiar with, I have no doubt in my mind of whether I am running good, or running bad. I know how to adjust not only my play, but my mind to grind through those swings. I also know that if I am losing money faster than normal, or going through wide swings, that I need to step back and evaluate. I can only ask myself: Do you honestly believe that you are playing your very very best. If I cannot answer yes to that, then I know that I should probably stop playing for while and regroup. If I answer yes to that, I then decide if I feel like playing more. Is my ego bruised over this? A little, but I would rather have my roll intact, and I will thank myself in the morning.

"In poker, anything can happen" is thrown around a lot. It bothers me on an intellectual and emotional level that I am struggling to move up as much as I am. It was for this that I wrote that post. I am attempting to wrap my mind around a game structure with properties that I am not familiar with, because I look at my stats, that can't lie to me, and something does not add up, and I asked, out of frustration (and a bruised Ego, if you will) what is going so wrong.

[daveT]

I want to add that there does need to be a certain amount of confidence in your own game when you are playing on the minimum stake. When I was playing limit, there was more than one time that I found myself with less than 20BBs, but that is the risk you take when you decide to glide with 300BBs.

I think it is the moving up and down feature, and the artificial cap on losses that confuse many players of HUSNGs, and that is why no one has any conclusive mathematical structure for moving up and down. I imagine I am not the only person on this forum who has moved up and down through the levels.

[jay_shark]

Dave ,you may use the kelly criterion as a way to determine when you should move up or down in limits . I was thinking about creating a thread on this but I think I would lose a few people and the thread would probably be uninteresting to most .

I get the feeling that not many readers of the heads up forum are interested in the math associated with bankroll management .

[TNixon]

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So, I asked, what have people ACTUALLY DONE to build their rolls.

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Well, starting with a roll of about $20, somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 or 9 months ago, over 6000 games, I have yet to go bust playing heads-up using a 5-10 buyin rule. I only played 5 buyins in a recent drop to $5 tables, though, because I figured I'd be much happier and better off redepositing $100 than grinding it out at the $2s. The first time I went through the $5s, when I was still trying to figure out how to not totally suck, which took me probably a lot longer than most people, I played 10 buyins.

I've been in the range where I could play $100-$200 sngs a number of times, and slowed down my rule for anything over $50, wanting 15 buyins instead of 10, and even then I was table-selecting pretty heavily with sharkscope. Lately I've been getting hammered every time I get back to the $50 range, so I've adjusted a little bit there, and am waiting for 13 buyins to play 50s.

I have had to redeposit a couple times (but not recently, not even after experiencing a $3k downswing which was most of what I had in my account), but only because I seem to do much more poorly at anything that's not a HUSNG. Just to give you an idea of how badly I do at everything else, sharkscope currently shows me with about $6k profit from HUSNGs, but my actual bankroll is just under $600. I've cashed out a total of somewhere around $2500, but I've also had a couple decent MTT wins, for about $1600 total I think, so that really only accounts for about $900.

Apparently SNGs (I also show a profit at 9 person sngs, with a much better overall ROI, but I don't play those as much) are funding some very bad gambling habits at other forms of poker, such as getting crushed for like 6 buyins at $100NLHU a couple weeks ago, and a very similar drop recently at 6max.

My player name is T28333, if you want to have a gander at my sharkscope graph. It's pretty helter-skelter and all over the place, though, with big runs of nearly breaking even, punctuated by big gains and (usually smaller) drops. If the future follows the past patterns, then I'm due to start a big spike upwards in the next couple hundred games. (If only that particular gambler's fallacy were true) [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

And that's what I've actually done.