Wednesday, 9 January 2008

Statistical Significance, Poker Addict

People often rave about thier great BB/100 and often complain about "Huge" downswings. I personally have done both. But realising just how statistically significant your results are depends on the number of trails run. A statiscally significant amount is considered 10k hands, but to be a bit more in depth you really need to aim for 25k+ to draw accurate conlusions.

After running my own numbers I see how insignificant my stats actually are at this point. What i thought was a downswing was nothing more than a little varience and the fact that i was probably on a heater before the varience occured made it seem like a much bigger downswing than it actually was.

Prior to my miniscule downswing I had become very self-assured in my game and my poker ability. The downswing was pokers way of telling me to pull my head in. It was making sure I didnt get to big for my boots and that I always reviewed my game and keept on trying to improve and better my poker ability.

It seems poker has a funny way of creating many varying emotions. When you run well you feel immortal, when you run bad you feel like you couldnt win if you could pick what card would come next, and when you run right in the middle poker becomes boring yet you still cant stop playing it.

Poker is addictive, managing your addiction and your emotions that the addiction evokes are essiantals in beating poker and become a winning player.

I'll leave you with some insignificant numbers. Please take note of my VPIP/PFR etc. in both pictures.

The top one is my "downswing" of 6k hands., the one below is my first 9k hands at $10NL Below that is a running total profit of all hands.

Free Image Hosting at allyoucanupload.com

Free Image Hosting at allyoucanupload.com

1 comment:

Zach said...

Definitely been there. Especially when your stats are so similar, just keep playing your game. Although your first one probably was somewhat of a hot run, you probably aren't playing losing poker if you can put together that many hands and win that much. Just keep playing through it and regression to the mean will occur, I promise ;).

On a side note, my PFR% is higher than your VP$IP, meaning that theoretically I'm raising with hands you're folding. Obviously this isn't the case as I'll make a lot of plays depending on position and opponents where my cards don't even matter, just thought it was an interesting bit of information.

But yeah, run hot and you feel like a natural poker player, run cold and you blame the cards. But in reality all you can do is play the hands like you know you should and play enough hands and it'll all work out. Good luck.