More on winrate distribution

[anchorbanker71]

I did some searching on this topic and found a couple threads, but none that came to any sort of hard conclusion about winrate distribution.

Has anyone been able to do some calculations in order to come up with a correlation between winrate and percentile of players? For example, to be able to say Player 1 has a long term winrate of 1.5BB/100, which puts him in the X percentile of all players. Player 2 has a winrate of .5BB/100 which puts him in Y percentile, etc, etc.

I realize that there are probably several variables that make the question more difficult to answer, not the least of which being limits, online vs B&M, single tabler vs multitabler and so on. However I think we all strive to not only make money as poker players, but to continually see how we stack up against the rest of the poker community, from the very worst to the very best. Therefore, I'd be curious to know for example if my winrate of XBB/100 makes me just "above average", "very good" or "great". Self serving I realize....but who cares? [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

[Dazarath]

You pointed out one thing, which is that the winrates are different for different limits. For example, I hear that 5 BB/100 is supposed to be pretty solid at the PP 0.50/1 games, but if you're playing 100/200, I hear 1 BB/100 is very good, and 5 BB/100 is probably impossible. Another thing is, most people don't know their winrate. Even with 100k hands, the estimated 95%ish confidence interval is supposed to be +/- 0.5 BB/100. If you go around asking players what their BB/100 is, even the biggest fish doesn't think he has a negative winrate, despite his 1500 BB loss at a particular limit.

[mmcd]

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You pointed out one thing, which is that the winrates are different for different limits. For example, I hear that 5 BB/100 is supposed to be pretty solid at the PP 0.50/1 games, but if you're playing 100/200, I hear 1 BB/100 is very good, and 5 BB/100 is probably impossible. Another thing is, most people don't know their winrate. Even with 100k hands, the estimated 95%ish confidence interval is supposed to be +/- 0.5 BB/100. If you go around asking players what their BB/100 is, even the biggest fish doesn't think he has a negative winrate, despite his 1500 BB loss at a particular limit.

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I don't think it's possible to pin down a win rate with any degree of certainty at all. By the time you've played enough hands, your game will have changed/evolved, and the game you're playing in will have changed/evolved.

[daisyglaze]

You wouldn't need to know the exact expectation of any individual to answer the question in the op. Just the overall distribution of winrates at a given game and limit.

[mmcd]

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You wouldn't need to know the exact expectation of any individual to answer the question in the op. Just the overall distribution of winrates at a given game and limit.

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In order to do this, you'd need to have sample size as a variable too, and it would be impossible to get any meaningful results since variance plays such a huge role in small samples, and only a relatively small number of players attain a reasonably large sample at any given game/limit.

If you were to look at a distribution of winrates over 5k hands, you'd probably catch a lot of players, but the results would be all over the place. If you were to look at the distribution of winrates over 200k hands, the results would be more reliable, but you'd only be dealing with a few (likely winning) players.

[coolandtough]

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You wouldn't need to know the exact expectation of any individual to answer the question in the op. Just the overall distribution of winrates at a given game and limit.

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it would be impossible to get any meaningful results

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This is one of those questions where the answer is: ask a reasonable number of regulars in a given game to give you their estimates of the distribution. Statistical techniques simply cannot give you any better answer (unless you happen to own a large poker site, have access to the entire database of hand histories, and have the computing power to work with the data).

[KaneKungFu123]

i agree with mmcd about the games changing, and you changing (hopefully for the better).