blonde poker forum

I am literally tearing my hair out at the moment.

I seem to be getting a huge amount of badbeats at the moment online, constantly getting it in good...constantly sucked out on. Its to the point where I've started predicting the turn/river blow.

I very rarely if ever moan about run bad, but this is mentally destroying me now.  Is there anyway of using my HUD (HEM1) for finding out how below ev I'm running in tourneys at the mo?  It would probs be helpful to my mental game to be able to grind on through knowing that variance will swing around!

All advice greatly appreciated

Don't play MTTs

50p

You'll become on of those guys checking the equivalent of their ev every other tourney if I tell you how. Negative thoughts not going to help, just play your best, study and improve.

It was meant as a joke, I thought you would take it that way. I didn't mean to offend.

Please accept my apologies.

The 2 measures in hem are winnings vs ev adjusted, which is simply a measure of chips won. Also there is bb/100 and evbb/100 which measure by each individual blind level. The latter is probably a more accurate measure of run bad.

For example the latter in my hem db is very close to each other over 2 million+ hands, whereas the former has an 8 figure difference!

I'm sure it'll just become more of a mindset leak. You can check lots of things in Hold'em Manager reports, such as % of coinflips won or compare your chips won vs ev chips won. Or ev bb/100 vs actual bb/100. Unfortunately they take a long time to converge to anything meaningful. I think ev bb/100 is the best stat to look at but I can't look myself. I dont want to know how good I run.

Last year I ran unreal good for 40,000 hands on the Internet.

Then I went to business and played 10-20times bigger stakes and ran horrific over about 2,500 hands. I'd prolly had 2 periods in those 40k hands previous where I'd run equally as badly and not even really noticed. I lost 3x in the 2,500 hands I'd won in the 40k previously.

Which buttons we press, how many chips we put in the pot and whether we stack in random piles or neat stacks of 20...these are thing we can control and we should focus our energy and brain power onto those things...

Russian politics, the weather and how good we run and where we run good are things we can't control, and therefore energy spent thinking or worrying about them is energy that is wasted.

You don't wake up in the middle of the night sweating over Russian immigration policy, so don't sweat about this either.

If you wish to pursue the activities as per our conversation the other day, I suggest you seriously reconsider.

1/ dish bags
2/ crushing bro's
3/ banging ho's

#lovethegame

Variance is a joke, such a high percentage of people have no clue about it and then those who have a decent understanding of it don't think it'll happen to them, it's pretty boring.

Assuming you aren't playing for a living don't worry about it, play and hope to run good, if it bothers you that much find something else to do, coz MTT grinding is not much fun.

Had a smile all day and knocked it in. #witheroldpros

In a similar way drug addicts talk to frank, tilt/run bad problems? Talk to rexas ;)

Had an idea about this a couple of years ago surprised nobody has taken it up. Regardless of the value of it I feel sure that a well marketed piece of software that measured variance would sell really well. Opportunity for someone :]

Might just sell a random piece of kit which tells you you run bad. It's what every player thinks and wants to hear

Lol George.   And if the cheque bounces u can change their status to ' your'e just sh*t'

had this last year and had it for huge periods BUT. it got to the stage where i started unconsciously playing terrible poker just because i could blame stuff on run bad, i got lazy and lost heaps. Now im playing so much better and building stacks where i can sustain a few lost flips in most tourneys. If youre playing well and play enough tourneys no amount of bad beats can hold you back for long.

define long?

1000 mtts

http://www.nsdpoker.com/2011/01/mtt-pros/#more-134

more relevant as ever when ROI's are generally dropping,  playing mtt's for a living seems unpleasant to me.

If you are a recreational player or a pro with a low ROI% then variance is going to be mega high. I guess being a semi-decent MTT player will be frustrating because as that chart shows that wholly posted up, you will lose 45% of the time over 1k tourneys as a 20% roi player. The solution is to get better at poker and have a better ROI. It's very possible to still get a 60-100% ROI at $50ABI but that seems to be reserved for the elites.

If you play 180's for a living then GL. The very best 180 players probably have a 20% ROI if they include all stakes and as the stats show, this means that you will naturally have to endure a lot of variance indeed (ask Ray).

The best treatment for getting over run bad is taking time off in my experience. Unfortunately I need to grind quite hard atm as I need the money so I have to play through it. It's ultimately difficult to play when everything is going against you but most of the time these days when I wake up in the morning I don't feel the affects of my results from the past couple of days/weeks.

How many runners before it becomes a 'Large field' MTT?

when ur on a bad run, don't look for a measure of how unlucky u are, just get better at poker

for the purposes of Noahs investigation he used the measure of 181+ (bascically meant it cant be a sit'n'go)

So according to his theory, I wonder what the optimum number of runners is.

the problem with thinking about "measuring" run bad is that is completely ruins your objectivity, for over 12 months now I've had all-in EV turned off my poker tracker, and it's made me so much happier.

Yes, in theory a way to "measure" run-bad would actually have some use analytically (mostly in selecting games I'd imagine) but what happens with any stat centered around run-good/run-bad is that it is used in that manner by 0.00000000000001% of poker players and by the rest as a search for justification for losses, or simply as a fact to back up a moan of some description. No (or at least hardly any) humans are emotionally capable of actually having this information (myself included) so honestly the further you can put this thread from your mind the better.

Taking it completely away from a strategy angle - is/is not useful information from an analysis point of view - it's actually really, really bad for morale, thinking about this information, and even moreso actually having it can bring no positives. If you're actually very unlucky you'll feel bad about how unlucky you are, if it turns out you're incredibly lucky then you'll just either slightly worse than you currently do or be totally unaffected.

Enjoy your poker, think about it as clearly and as cleanly as you can and allow the hands of fortune to put whatever turn and river cards they want down.

Noah's research is not a theory, it's mathematical evidence - the only way it can be disputed is for someone to go over all the mathematical calcs again and see if he's gotten it wrong (I can't imagine anyone really wanting to do that)

he did right a follow up blog to that one here http://www.nsdpoker.com/2011/02/mtt_pros_2/ where he showed variations on his findings for just "large field" (181+) and small field (just 180mans I think) and also showed the difference is extreme buyin variations, not surprisingly it shows that smaller field tournaments are LESS variance than large field tournaments, but the conclusion is certaiinly NOT that one is better/worse/more optimal than the other, like i say it's not a theory or a strategy article, it's purely a presentaion of mathematical data.

How many runners a scheduled MTT gets is totally uncontrolable (aside from a min/max entrants clause by the provider) and whether you're more optimal in 6max/9max/18man/45man/90man/180man SnG's will be entirely down to you personally (a number of factors, like bankroll, style etc)

so in short there is no optimal number of runners for an MTT :P (for the players at least!)

Yes.

Theory was a bad choice of word.

lol sorry i've re-read my post it sounds a little patronising (forgive me I'm very hungover today)

That's not really true though.

Yes, it's pretty easy to look at a single session, it says you ran -57396308 below ev, but really that's pretty meaningless as it's so easily distorted. But, if you have a huge sample over say a year and are losing, then you look at bb/100 vs evbb/100 with antes and it says you aren't running bad then you almost certainly have leaks, that's a helpful 1st step to plugging said leaks. I do agree though that close to a 100% of people that use these stats do it far too frequently and use meaningless numbers as an easy excuse.

Not letting it effect you and managing to play at least close to your A game when your running horrendous is what separates you from the rest and is how you crush.

It's pretty obvious that if your moaning about running bad, think it's 100% down to that and aren't putting any effort into improving then that's a huge mental leak as well as just lacking in any effort to achieve anything in the game.

The fact is, if you play online for a living, and you survive long enough, than at some stage it's very likely you are going to be in the tiny percentile who have a stage of running absolutely horrendous, suck it up and play good and it'll be over a lot quicker than if you let it fuck with your head.

Not at all. It was a bad choice if word, and pointing it out helped me understand your explanation.


Text is such a difficult medium sometimes.

I don't really agree with that (not in my games anyway) I'd say that AIEV is about one of the least relevant stats (along with bb/100 as well actually) if you need to look at 1years sample size and to see that you're not running bad to realise you have leaks then you have way bigger problems. "leak-busting" is a continuous progress where you constantly look at your play and use the information you have about your play to the best of your ability - no-one is ever fully "leak-busted" as just as good parts come into your game bad parts will do as well.

However - even if I felt that AIEV was a relevant stat for analysis on my game, most people (and I mean nearly ALL people) aren't mentally capable of using the information well (I certainly am not) - just IMO ofc. hence why I've removed the stat from my tracker and won't be looking at it again.


Anyone who is a professional poker player has, imo, run incredibly good.

I was speaking to some guys on skype receently who said he'd done a "variance simulation" or something like that for 6m PLO, he said the deviation from EV was 180bb/100 so (sample of 2.5m hands), for me who's survived playing online poker full time for a fair few years I must have run very very well in the timing and severity of my downswings/upswings.

I'd like to think that the quality of emotional/personal/technical decisions I've made over the course of my career have given me a big advantage but in realty when I started out I was a huge favorite to fail and required a great deal of good fortune not to.

A year was an over exaggeration tbh, and yeah there will be better ways to find leaks, but a lot of people aren't aware of them, or how to use them, just saying that there are positives to get from the numbers, if used appropriately.

I had a similar discussion, I could've quite feasibly started out and had the results that I'm currently getting, I would've just thought I was terrible and quit a long time ago and never gave poker another look. To be able to make a decent living from staring at a screen clicking buttons you'd be hard pressed to convince the 50 year old woman who cleans toilets for minimum wage that you aren't running pretty good in life.

yeh, effectively we're talking about maintaining objectivity throughout bad (and indeed good) runs at poker.

I don't think I'm capable of doing it, so I just don't look D

But we're basically in agreement :P

Tbh I think suck it up buttercup is exactly the way to look at it, change the flow chart to;

Am I playing 100% perfect poker > no > think about your game > HH reviews > watch vids /articles etc > am I now playing 100% perfect poker > no > think more about your game (and so on) how good or bad you are running has no need to be in there! That would be implying that we would never need to do any work on our poker if we were running good...

It will also distract from your enjoyment of the game quite significantly if the starting point for any thought about poker is "am I running bad"

If I had a penny for every time I say "how's things?" And the snap answer is "60buyins under EV this month" ....

I mean everyone will have their own opinions on how best to analyse their game for leaks, and would be arrogant for anyone to say they know better than anyone else when its quite a personal thing, but my personal opinion is that a measure of run-bad or EV etc has no place along the leak-busting process.

I've taken measures to actively remove it from mine lol