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.
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.
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.
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.
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