after thoughts

I found one tool which helps to better understand the swings in the game. It actually calculates the "risk of ruin" which means the risk of losing all your bankroll for your given winrate, standard deviation and bankroll.

Here is the link:

http://www.poker-tools-online.com/riskofruin.html

You can write your winrate and standard deviation in terms of per 100 hands instead of per hour, make sure the units match, that's all.

Let's have a look at my risk of ruin knowing that my winrate is 9 bb/100 standard deviation 95 bb/100 and bankroll 45000 (as I started playing NL1000 this month, I'm putting down my winrate for 2008 in all levels which may be a little optimistic)

My risk of ruin calculates

0.012653%

which is very close to zero so I can confidently play with this bankroll if I can keep my winrate on this level. The interesting part is that the possilibility of losing 10000 is 13% with these stats. (which will mean I don't have enough bankroll to keep playing on this limit).

A few days ago really ugly situations occured and I ended up losing 6k (the biggest share went into the pockets of imakitrain who I find way too over-aggro and I can exploit in the long run). I didn't go on a huge tilt after losing that amount but I thought that I was the unluckiest guy on earth. Even if we assume that I was able to keep my winrate against imakitrain and other regulars of the day when we look at this calculator we see that the possibility of this event was 30%.

I want to stress out a few points about these calculations, first of all the standard deviation calculated by the poker tracker is accused to be biased because 100 hands in no limit hold'em don't have a normal distribution and it should have been done by 1000 hands. There is a strange dispute going on this stuff at

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/15/poker-theory/depth-analysis-variance-poker-23281/#post378062

I forgot about all this statistical methods I saw in the university but I will look at this more carefully one day I suppose. Untill then I see nothing wrong about using poker tracker's SD.


After the day I lost 6k during 3 days I recovered almost all of it. I will post here 2 hands I played today (I don't want to turn this blog into a whinning area but I can't help posting these 2)

http://www.pokerhand.org/?3711996
http://www.pokerhand.org/?3712006

two "two-outers" in one day is a lot but I'm proud I ended the session +1k.

Wait for me NL 2000 I'm coming!

Good luck my fellow grinders!

PS: let's not be blind against Israel's cruelty. Force your governments to do something about it if you can. All we want is peace.