Winrates, bankrolls, and finances

Nice! Where do you play?

Just spend a **** load of hours in solver and strive to play theoretically optimally as possible, just mixing in light exploits like overfolding vs nits. Also play/study like an online player until you beat 100nl+. Live players are extremely bad and it's shooting fish in a barrel for any decent online player

Inspiring and motivational thread here. Keep it up!

Last night I went home dejected that I'm playing in a 1/2 game I cannot beat. My cardroom raised their rake to 10 percent up to 60 + up to 3 additional for promotions. The promotions are hard to win because they run at inconvenient times or fill up the room, and there are no seats, or pay out 100,000 just once a year. Add to that a stingy $1 tip to the dealers who work only for tips. Now, when you win a pot with 60, you feel like you paid for a large bowl of soup but got a small one that retails for only 50. I still make plenty of errors. There is lots of room to improve my game. With a degen or whale on the table, I feel like a pro. But when average loose-passives populate the table, and stacks go below 200, it feels like the game is unbeatable. The margin for error just gets too thin, and the variance of multiway pots with all the loose passives is brutal.

For decades, I was lucky to play in games run for tips in warehouses in bad neighborhoods. I was prepared these games would get robbed eventually. Then the casino opened up and killed all the home games. I know the rake is the price you pay for civilized poker in public. My family appreciates now I won't get shot. But if you are priced out of poker, how civilized is the world, really?

Please feel free to write: this question has been covered hundreds of times in the forum.

Very smart and reasonably poker smart but somewhat undisciplined young LAG rec who plays better than most of the local regs did a bet with his non poker buddy whether he could win 100k+ in my player pool in 1 month.

I think the bet motivated him to play his best and to put a lot of volume at the best prime time hours. He is young and single with a demanding job, but he had more time off during the holidays when he started the bet in late December. I definitely suspect that he cut down on the spewy nonsense that he would sometimes do when he would normally get bored because he really wanted to win this bet.

He hit his target in less than 3 weeks and won the bet.

3 weeks, 100k? What stake was this

Yeah, $6 + $3 + $1 is fairly brutal for a 1/2 NL game. With shortish stacks (i.e. < $200) and high rake, my guess is a decent strategy to have a shot is outnitting your opponents by playing *extremely* nitty (which is what I do in my $9 + $2 + $1 1/3 NL game).

Ggoodluck!G

The stakes were a combination of:

5/5/10 bounty ($25 bonus from every player to someone who wins 2+ pots in a row) with mandatory $25 single board NLHE bomb pots. Sometimes mandatory straddle to $20.

5/10/20 double bounty ($50 bonus from every player to someone who wins 2+ pots in a row) with mandatory $50 single board NLHE bomb pots. Sometimes mandatory straddle to $40.

It is hard to convert these structures to “vanilla” NLHE structures, but I think say that the stakes were a mix of 10/20 NLHE to 20/40 NLHE essentially.

Where the hell can you play those stakes in a public poker room? I thought the 10-20+ player pool was fleeing to private games.

Sounds like Gardens. If it's one of the young kids I'm thinking of he runs pretty damn pure too. My last couple of LA trips the same 2 kids have gotten it in bad against me multiple times and I have yet to get any money back from those pots.

At 20-40 if he played 12 hours/ day for 21 straight days, its about 10bb/hour, its doable but still very impressive.

Thanks for the advice. I always read your posts, so maybe one day I’ll have the skill to shift gears into GGnit. Sorry about that rake (although misery loves company).

What's your bankroll?

If it's >$10k you should be taking shots at the $5 level ASAP

Others have told me that too. Bankroll was up to $3.5K, now down to 2.7. I have about $500 a month cash flow for recreation. To play 2/5, I would want to be rolled closer to 20K. I could take some cash out of my IRA now, paying the penalty. Or wait nine years until I retire. The kid will be done with college, house almost paid off, a large state pension in addition to savings, endless time to play poker.

My low estimate is that my cardroom took from the pots I won about 10K. I'm trying to get an unraked home game started to build up my bankroll.

So an UPDATE: while I’m up a bit over $13,000 since I started this in July, the inevitable DOWNSWING has struck, and after yet another two-bullet/$600 losing session yesterday, I am down to just $300 left in my sock drawer.

I don’t know what to do! I wanted to avoid ever having to withdraw money from our checking account, and now that’s exactly what’s happened!

(Complicating all this is that I’ve just had a Round 2 interview for a full-time job, which, if I get it, would allow me to quit poker…So, I don’t know, I might only be needing to play for another couple weeks, maybe I just pray this final $300 bullet can carry me through? But I’m not stupid, I know there’s no way in hell I can play well knowing if I lose I can never play again…that’s how I played as a Degen in my 20s, and I SUCKED!)

So anyway, I don’t know what to do. Why couldn’t I have just tripled up yesterday???

IMNSHO You have two good choices:

Withdraw some more cash to play (I'd probably go for $2k).

Stop playing until you see if you get the job.

I here ya Davo. I'm currently on the worst downswing I've had in two years. Played yesterday feeling good like there's no way there is any more 2 outer or running straights that are still to get me. Yet it continues to happen. If there's a card in the deck to save these people's lives their hitting it. Its frustrating and makes you second guess yourself. I wish I had the magic answer for both of us.

Love the fact that Dave-O has sock drawer poker money. I have toque drawer poker money (of course).

Toque drawer always starts at $3K. When it drops below $2K (what I bring to my 1/3 NL game, even though I BI for just $200 and never get remotely close to being in for even half of what I bring), I withdraw from the bank to top back up to $3K. When it gets above $4K, I drop it back down to $3K and deposit the rest in the bank. I have an extremely low variance style, so very rarely am I withdrawing from the bank (would required a $1K "downswing" for me, which is quite rare).

In Dave-O's case, if money is no object, then top up the sock drawer appropriately from bank funds. If money for life is tight and maybe not easily replenishable right now, I wouldn't play poker again until it is. IMO.

Ggoodluck!G

Quick question, what do you think is the best indicator of your true CURRENT winrate?

A. Lets say you play 1000 hours/year

1. The past year (1000 hours)
2. Past 2 years (2000 hours)
3. Past 5 years (5k hours)
4. Your entire poker career no matter how long

B. Same question but for 500 hours/year

Overall, I think the bigger sample size is one that matters the most. Yes, some of those hours could have been put in a decade+ ago in different conditions and might not seem as applicable. But I think overall it is likely a better indicator of a realistic winrate than much smaller sample sizes (even if the smaller sample sizes are in more recent conditions), one that helps outrun (slightly?) the up/down variance in lol smaller samples.

ETA: I mean, my best yearly (lol ~500 hour) sample size is about ~5 times better than my worst. And my cherry picked best ~1000 hour stretch is about ~3 times better than my worst ~1300 hour stretch. So I'm certainly not going to make any assumptions about my "current" winrate based on the last lol 500 / 1000 hours.

G4forboth,imoG

for what purpose….financial planning or dick waving? (I don’t mean dick waving in a critical way but can’t think of a less obnoxious form of words)

Depends on the person and the stage/level your game is in.

Were you an absolute beginner 2k hrs ago and have spent the last year intensely studying and improving?

Or are you already a crusher who is making incrementally tweaks to their game?

Also the quality of games you've played over the span of hours.

So tough to say really unless you have some more info on these types of variables.

But all things being equal I'd probably lean towards the last 1k hrs being the most reflective. And that could be something as simple as the quality of your games has gotten better/worse, but it's still reflective of your current winrate.

Your self-evaluation. Ideally, you would play online where you would have a bigger sample size and have a better idea of what stakes you win and for how much.

FWIW, one way I was convinced that my expected win rate was lower than I wnated it to be was going to pokerdope and doing variance calculations.

However -and that's the interesting part- the thing is my playstyle is constantly changing and the playing conditions also change, so I split my play history in roughly 3-4 periods in which i had different win rates.

So, after I did the pokerdope calculations I went on an unbelievable heater which was followed by a soul-crashing downswing. So, If I go on pokerdope and try to do variance calculations based on the observed win rate of any period of time, there's no assumed overall win rate that can explain the swings that I 've experienced. And that's even after I widen pokerdope's assumptions about standard deviation and such.

So either even pokerdope can underrate the potential swings or alternatively, my game, and thus my expected winrate, changes depending on the approach I take over specific time frames.