Must Be a Full Moon
Some of us like to write poetry on our blogs, bitterly lament the social ills of our times, perhaps wax philosophical. I like to think of my blog as a catchall for excess mental diarrhea. If you're interested in the geekery of my current job, keep on. Otherwise, go learn how to be a playah.
So I recently moved up limits again, which you might think of as being analagous to a pay raise, except that your new coworkers are far more smelly, nasty and vicious than before, so you're not really sure if you're happy about the whole thing. I really have no idea where these guys come from, but they're all thoroughly insane. And by insane I mean blindly aggressive with regards to the way they play poker. They'll cap any draw on every street, and check-raise bluff the river any chance they get. When they aren't hitting cards, this means you get to make an assload of money. When they do, you sortof vomit a little inside your mouth, and think about buying a nice sturdy roap to hang above the nearest chair.
I mentioned before that a decent poker bankroll should be around 300 times the size of the big bet for that limit. So for $10/$20 limit, you should have a playing bankroll of at least $6k. But your bankroll requirements are also determined by the amount of luck involved in the game you're playing in. Poker players use a statistical tool known as standard deviation to "measure" luck. Standard deviation is simply stated the average range within which your wins and losses will fall for every one hundred hands played. The more aggressive the players are, the more wildly your standard deviation will vary, since your wins and losses will be much higher.
Time for a little math!
Statisticians have come up with formulas for determining the size of a gamblers bankroll for any given game, based on his risk of ruin (chance he'll have bad luck and lose for an extended period of time). With a 5% risk of a ruin, one formula states:
Bankroll = (1.64sigma)^2/4u
where u is the player's hourly winrate.
To determine your hourly winrate though, you need to have played many, many, many hands at your current limit. The formula for this involves the player's standard devation, and determines the players winrate within a certain confidence interval (another fancy statistical term, simply saying that given x, y, and z factors, we can say with 95% confidence that your winrate falls within this particular range, and is not the same thing as saying you have a 95% chance of having that particular winrate).
95% CI = u +/- 1.96*s/sqrt(r)
where u again is your winrate (though not hourly, but in terms of BB/100), s is your standard deviation, and r is the number of hands you've played at a given limit. Most poker players don't understand these concepts, are completely unaware of the amount of luck involved in online hold'em, and thus are dismayed when they hit their first big downswing and lose their entire (and underfunded as we see) bankroll. Granted, many of these players are long term losers, but a winning player who is underbankrolled can go broke just as easily.
So. I have about 7k hands at my current limit over the last week, a standard deviation of 20BB/100, and a current winrate of 5BB/100. Calculating my true winrate within a 95% confidence interval, falls within the range of 0.31 - 9.69BB/100. Which is basically to say that I could be anywhere from a break-even player, to a massive 8BB/100 winner. If I calculate the same standard deviation and winrate over 100000 hands, it lies within 3.76 - 6.24 BB/100. Therefore the higher the standard deviation you have, and the fewer hands you've played, the larger the possible range
your true winrate can fall inside a 95% CI.
This is all a fancy way of saying, poker is gambling, until you've played a very large number of hands. It takes me five months to play 100k hands, and even then, I can only have a very general idea of how much money I can expect to make on an hourly basis. In the meantime, it is necessary to have the bankroll to cover the crazy fluctuations, and the emotional discipline to keep playing well while such things happen.
As an unlucky anonymous gambler recently said, "These swings have chopped off my balls and left me with a camel toe the size of Michigan." In the last two days, I've had the largest run of good luck and bad luck since I've been playing (over 500k hands), mostly due to the increased aggression of higher limit players. For some reason, these things always happen to me on back to back days. Earlier in the summer I lost 130BB and gained it back in two days. This time it was over 150BB.
By now this should make enough sense to you that it resembles a native African villager stricken with Elephantitis.
Thank God for Commerce tonight.
So I recently moved up limits again, which you might think of as being analagous to a pay raise, except that your new coworkers are far more smelly, nasty and vicious than before, so you're not really sure if you're happy about the whole thing. I really have no idea where these guys come from, but they're all thoroughly insane. And by insane I mean blindly aggressive with regards to the way they play poker. They'll cap any draw on every street, and check-raise bluff the river any chance they get. When they aren't hitting cards, this means you get to make an assload of money. When they do, you sortof vomit a little inside your mouth, and think about buying a nice sturdy roap to hang above the nearest chair.
I mentioned before that a decent poker bankroll should be around 300 times the size of the big bet for that limit. So for $10/$20 limit, you should have a playing bankroll of at least $6k. But your bankroll requirements are also determined by the amount of luck involved in the game you're playing in. Poker players use a statistical tool known as standard deviation to "measure" luck. Standard deviation is simply stated the average range within which your wins and losses will fall for every one hundred hands played. The more aggressive the players are, the more wildly your standard deviation will vary, since your wins and losses will be much higher.
Time for a little math!
Statisticians have come up with formulas for determining the size of a gamblers bankroll for any given game, based on his risk of ruin (chance he'll have bad luck and lose for an extended period of time). With a 5% risk of a ruin, one formula states:
Bankroll = (1.64sigma)^2/4u
where u is the player's hourly winrate.
To determine your hourly winrate though, you need to have played many, many, many hands at your current limit. The formula for this involves the player's standard devation, and determines the players winrate within a certain confidence interval (another fancy statistical term, simply saying that given x, y, and z factors, we can say with 95% confidence that your winrate falls within this particular range, and is not the same thing as saying you have a 95% chance of having that particular winrate).
95% CI = u +/- 1.96*s/sqrt(r)
where u again is your winrate (though not hourly, but in terms of BB/100), s is your standard deviation, and r is the number of hands you've played at a given limit. Most poker players don't understand these concepts, are completely unaware of the amount of luck involved in online hold'em, and thus are dismayed when they hit their first big downswing and lose their entire (and underfunded as we see) bankroll. Granted, many of these players are long term losers, but a winning player who is underbankrolled can go broke just as easily.
So. I have about 7k hands at my current limit over the last week, a standard deviation of 20BB/100, and a current winrate of 5BB/100. Calculating my true winrate within a 95% confidence interval, falls within the range of 0.31 - 9.69BB/100. Which is basically to say that I could be anywhere from a break-even player, to a massive 8BB/100 winner. If I calculate the same standard deviation and winrate over 100000 hands, it lies within 3.76 - 6.24 BB/100. Therefore the higher the standard deviation you have, and the fewer hands you've played, the larger the possible range
your true winrate can fall inside a 95% CI.
This is all a fancy way of saying, poker is gambling, until you've played a very large number of hands. It takes me five months to play 100k hands, and even then, I can only have a very general idea of how much money I can expect to make on an hourly basis. In the meantime, it is necessary to have the bankroll to cover the crazy fluctuations, and the emotional discipline to keep playing well while such things happen.
As an unlucky anonymous gambler recently said, "These swings have chopped off my balls and left me with a camel toe the size of Michigan." In the last two days, I've had the largest run of good luck and bad luck since I've been playing (over 500k hands), mostly due to the increased aggression of higher limit players. For some reason, these things always happen to me on back to back days. Earlier in the summer I lost 130BB and gained it back in two days. This time it was over 150BB.
By now this should make enough sense to you that it resembles a native African villager stricken with Elephantitis.
Thank God for Commerce tonight.
posted by mittens at 9/16/2005 02:32:00 PM
2 Comments:
Michigan... HA.
elephantitis... are you referring to something in particular? Yes, yes, I believe you are.
Un Scrotum Elephotum
Post a Comment
<< Home