blonde poker forum

After a two year break, I recently started playing live cash games again.

I'm recording my results on a simple to use online poker diary, but I don't understand some of the statistics.

Why for instance, is my overall win rate per hour more than my average win rate per hour?

Have you tried turning it on and off again?

Yes. I turned it off for two years and then I turned it on again. :-)

Overall win rate is your complete profit/loss divided by the complete hours played.

Average win rate is an average of each individual hour in a session. So every hours win rate added together divided by the number of sessions.

Think this is right off the top off my head

Cose it is

How's it been going since the return to action, Tom?

Are they wise to your cold 4 betting tendencies yet?

win rate?

thin brag imo

Incredible - this post includes no food rubdowns.....I would have bet a pound to win a penny it would.

Not sure about the point of the stat - I suppose it could show up if you played badly in long sessions, but other than that it should be close to your overall win rate when enough samples are taken.

Disappointed. Was hoping this would be a British Prime Ministers thread.

Hello  Tom! Not seen you in an age hope everything is good :)

These results will be so massively skewed by big results either way in the immediate future that they will both likely be all over the place.

From what i have noticed, Tom bossing the 50/1.00 Game, need to move up the gears now Tom,  8)

Hmmm. I made that mistake last time. :-(

It's going ok from a tiny sample. (6 sessions).

Cold 4 betting tendencies? I think you're confusing me with Alan Stern.

These two numbers should be no different for any data set, barring rounding errors it's essentially a roundabout way of doing the same calculation.

The only thing I could guess at for the distinction is that one of them takes account of the stakes. Is one in bb and one in £?

They should give different numbers no?

No.

They are different numbers - the second is calculated as 5 hours winning £100 and 2 hours winning  £100 ----  (20 + 50)/2 = 35 whereas the first is (100 +100)/7 =28.5

Brilliant.

Is this a guess or are you actually getting this from the site in question? Because that is no way to calculate anything. Extrapolate: We play 1 ten hour session and break even, and one 10 minute session and win £50. Is our average winrate £150/hr?

If you won £300 in one session and £0 in another your average win rate could quite correctly be called £150 per session - the title of this thread should give a good indication of the limitations of using statistics.

On a more general level - that's why for all statistics you should be looking at a large enough sample size to make it relevant. In this kind of case it would be more relevant if you the average win rate automatically excluded all sessions less than an hour long (or 2 or 3 ...) but I wouldn't expect any website to bother working out how to exclude outliers like this.

What is the name of this app please, or if anyone else knows of 1 that just gives 1 figure (preferably 1 that lies and just records my wins)? Ty

from the site

http://www.thehendonmob.com/MyPokerDiary/guide.php?p=8

£ 150 per session when we broke even in one and won £50 in the other? Doesn't seem quite correct to me...

Wow. Whoever wrote that has no clue about statistics.  It's literally meaningless. It's this sort of charlatanism that gives statistics a bad name.

As I said earlier the only use I can think of is that it might show that you play badly on long sessions (if you had sufficient samples).  ie your average win rate in long sessions is lower than in short sessions.  Probably quite important for an old boy like Red.

Oi!

As it happens, my ave session length is, apparently, 8.14 hours, followed by 4 hours of tantric sex, followed by an hour's drive home to Mrs Red.

hmmm yeah that is a bit iffy

Given a reasonable sample size and excluding outliers, the difference between an average rate per session and your overall average rate would be a measure of consistency - but that's not particularly how they're presenting it.

Sample size has nothing to do with it, the measure is just mathematically wrong and therefore totally unreliable. It gives undue weight to results from shorter sessions, a breakeven or even slightly losing player who quits early when they get ahead would have a positive average win rate by this measure even after a million samples. If that player tried to garner anything from it, they'd play shorter and shorter sessions for absolutely no good reason. Just ignore it, it tells you literally nothing.

The overall stat is useless, but if you filtered session length (don't know if you can) it might have some use.

Haha.

It would then exactly match the overall average winrate for those sessions. I pm-ed Jamie a proof of this, can repost here if you're interested.

If we assume that we have sufficient samples, the fact that the overall stat and the session stat are significantly different might alert you to look deeper into your stats?

I agree though that it does look like someone just put it in without thinking it through, just trying to suggest some reason for it being there.

Given that it's just looking at averages and averages of averages the statement about it being 'mathematically wrong' is a bit odd - 'statistically meaningless' might be more appropriate.

Given a sufficient sample size you can make any kind of statistic and analyse it - whether they were in any way useful would be a different question.

So does it matter whether I use average or overall win rate per hour?

I reiterate, sample size is not going to help. It is mathematically wrong because it is treating numbers that are not equivalent as if they were, comparing apples and oranges. It is as useful as a one-number average of your opponents' heights and weights. It's a meaningless number anyway, and if it goes up there's no way to tell (from just the number) if it's because your opponents are getting taller or heavier.

@RED-DOG, use overall winrate per hour. Ignore the other one.