How big is your edge?

[Lyric]

Repost from BBV:

The edge in poker is a lot smaller than most think after considering the rake. I would guess that it's somewhere right around .5% after rake for most high stakes pros.

This is a graph of 32,000 coin flips. Each line represents a gambler who has a 50.5% chance to win each flip. As you can see, there can be wide differences in results between two gamblers with exactly the same skill level.:



Here is what a 51% edge looks like. Same thing here. Wide differences, same skill level:



And 52% to win each flip. With a 2% edge you pretty much never lose over 30k flips, but results(winrates) can be widely divergent:


53%.:


And finally, let's take a look at 50.25% to win each flip:

[kotkis]

The purple line runs better than anyone.

[EC10]

[ QUOTE ]
The purple line runs better than anyone.

[/ QUOTE ]
its aba

ZING

[T-God]

That's crazy/cool. Can you tell me how you came up with the .5% number?

[Lyric]

[ QUOTE ]
That's crazy/cool. Can you tell me how you came up with the .5% number?

[/ QUOTE ]

Just my guess.

You can sorta get a feel for it by experimenting with different edges and comparing to poker graphs. I would say it's prolly around .5%-1.5% (minus rake, which is significant, taking about about 30% of profit if you run at 2ptbb/100) for a good number of high stakes (1K NL+)pros.

[Jamougha]

The math/statistics guys can give you better statistical methods for this.

[FionnMac]

i have no idea whether you're estimate of .5bb is accurate, but it's pretty interesting, thanks for posting.

[MDMA]

While this is fun to see, it's not really working out this way since poker probably has CONSIDERABLY less variance than 50/50 coinflips, im pretty sure that if you do a similar graph for, lets say, a dice with 6 outcomes where you win on 5 out of 6 and the total edge comes out as 0.5%, they wouldn't be anyway near this "random".

[Isura]

turquoise = johnnycakes?

[Lyric]

[ QUOTE ]
The math/statistics guys can give you better statistical methods for this.

[/ QUOTE ]

Pokertracker does not give us enough information to determine what our edge is in poker. It won't tell us how much money we bet, total. This could be done by hand during live play.

Both Barry Greenstein and Phil Laak have apparently done so, determining that the edge in poker is about 3% for them, meaning that for every $100 they bet, they expect to earn about $3.

I would argue that it may actually be possible to have an edge this high for live poker, but for online play we're basically guessing until PT gives us a "total amount wagered" statistic -- or until someone plays one table and records everything by hand.

We can guess using avg number of people at the table, avg pot size, and VPIP, but that's just about as rough as looking at these graphs and guessing.