LittleWyvern.com

As part of my ongoing attempt to clean up and improve the site I turned today’s attention to my poker log. My previous method of record keeping – adding entries into an html table – worked well enough in terms of simply displaying and storing the information, however it did almost nothing for me in the more useful area of statistics. And so, to appease the inner math geek, I spent the better part of an hour transferring my past sessions from standard html into an Excel spreadsheet. As I copied each game’s results into the new format I gradually found myself doubting both the accuracy of past accomplishments and the validity of previous claims. For instance, it seemed to me that I was entering far more negative numbers than positive into the results column. I knew that my totals were correct, but I began to wonder where exactly those numbers were coming from. Am I truly a winning player – as I have claimed several times before? If so, in which games do I show the best results? Are there games that I would be better off avoiding?

To answer these questions I made two very important adjustments to my previous data.

1. I removed all entries for non-poker gambling. I have no doubt whatsoever that I am lifetime winner in blackjack. Even if I were a net loser since moving to Las Vegas I would likely still be positive when combined with my East Chicago and cruise ship results. Blackjack is a negative expectation game and I play it for no other reason than entertainment (somewhat strange since I find the game thoroughly non-entertaining), and even then I only play on random and special occasion – to entertain friends, for instance. I really have no interest in tracking these results because I have never had and certainly never will develop a desire to play semi-professionally. If I win, great. If I lose, BFD.

2. I removed all tournament entries from the log. This is for a more obvious reason: I don’t play tournaments. When I first got out here I played in the occasional daily crap shoot, the inevitable result being the loss of 50-60 dollars. These small tournaments have very little to do with poker; skill at the game being valued just about to the same extent as it is during a game of UNO. More importantly, though, is that my Bally’s WSOP win serves as an extreme outlier to my data. Ten hours of work for nearly five thousand dollars – that is not at all indicative of a normal hourly expectation. And since I have no plans to play in any future tournaments, I want to ignore the one event and focus instead on my cash game statistics. The only exception to the no-tournament rule was my participation in the 500k freeroll at Texas Station. My participation in that game was a direct result of my cash game play and was effectively offered by the casino as a reward for logging so many hours at their tables. I consider that a cash game win in the same way that I would consider a bad beat jackpot to be simply part of my normal cash game expectation (albeit a very small part).

When I reorganized my data I came upon a few surprising discoveries. Let me first give you a quick breakdown of the numbers.

Net Result: $2,471
Total Time: 310.25 hours
Average Rate: $7.96 / hour

(If I were to include the Bally’s win my result jumps five thousand dollars with a negligible increase in time, and nearly triples my hourly wage in the process.) First of all I want to say that I am somewhat surprised at how much I am ahead overall. It seemed to me that I had entered at least as many, if not more, negative entries than positive ones. That said, my results are actually much better than this.

Somehow I am lifetime winner in the vile and self-proclaimed “unbeatable” $2-$4 limit game. After 21.25 hours of play I am ahead in that game $254. I can actually expect to earn twelve dollars an hour playing with those noobs. That is absurd.

Not wholly unexpectedly my worst game is $4-$8 limit with a 1/2 kill. I knew that I would probably be a small winner or possibly a small loser, but I was a little stunned to see just how badly I perform in that game. After only 34.75 hours of play I am down $716. That is to say that when I sit down at a 4-8 table I can expect to lose more than twenty dollars per hour. Not cool. In truth that number is actually a bit better. This past week I went and played with Matt, but since he had no expendable cash I let him play with my money. I kept his winnings and ate his losses. We were both winning but at the end of the night he hit a rough patch of cards and ended up losing a fair amount of money. I was a pretty big winner in that game, but it wasn’t enough to compensate for the loss.

Not at all surprisingly, my best game is $1-$2 no limit. Having officially logged 238.75 hours my net profit is $3,450 – clocking my play at about $14.50 per hour. That is twice as much as I made working at EBX so I really have no cause for complaint.

You probably didn’t find that at all interesting, but to be fair the numbers are actually helpful to me. I reactivated my subscription to Live at the Bike a few days ago and have been spending a lot of my free time studying cash game play. Although a lot of the more interesting games in their archives involve games far beyond any limits that I could possibly afford, there are also a lot of episodes where the game is $3-$5 : the same game that I hope to move into. So far I feel as though I’ve actually learned quite a lot and am increasingly eager to try a few new techniques and playing styles of my own. And now that I can actually quantify my previous results – as well as examine the difference in my play between, say, the past six months and the six months before it, I am in a much better position to compare the results of any new technique to what I did before. For instance, rather than simply saying, “Hey, I won!” I can more accurately ask myself, “Well, did you win more than you expected?”

In the end I hope to be able to answer not just, “Did I win?” but also, and more importantly, “Am I getting better?”