Could some people just run cold?

I see all this about variance and that for the cold streaks people have they should wait and they'll heat back up eventually. Or, when people complain that they always get cracked, which we all know means they just remember when they get cracked, but what IF that person just DOES get cracked more than other players? I mean if we're talking about variance, why can't it be that 1 person's PF/Flop nuts DO get beat 51% of the time while another player's PF/Flop nuts win 51% of the time; how about that variance? I used 51%, but for some of you who use online to make a living maybe your variance is that your nuts HONESTLY hold up 62%, while someone else's nuts get cracked 62% (which to them would feel like "all the time").

Why can't it be that some players just are losing players while others just are winning players? Will the losing players win, sure. Will the winning players lose, sure. But why can't some of you accept that it may just be that people DO lose more than they should while others DO win more than they should?

In a larger scale, think of the lotto in/near your state. 1 person wins while 4M (or what not) lose. Now apply it on a smaller scale and winning players hit the 52 card lotto more than the losing players.

I also believe the negative variance online is getting to ridiculous new levels. And I also think the reason most can't except it, because they would have to face reality, and their dream of making a living playing poker would have to be flushed down the toilet.

Because random is random. Take an RNG and run a coin flip 10,000 times. I guarantee you it comes up heads within 49.9% - 50.1%. The RNG doesn't remember who's doing the flipping, hell it doesn't even know what a pair is in poker. So in the past it's possible your coin flips have come out 49%, but in the future you are still 50% to make every single coin flip assuming the site isn't rigged.

Please explain this statement. I don't think you know what you're talking about.

The odds are,that most people will lose at poker.If it wasnt for freerolls,most people would not be playing.So either get better or lose or find another hobby.

I get what he is saying. There are so many people who make poor plays that hands face crazy beats since people won't fold and will call to the river. If you are constantly playing these people you will find out what negative variance is.

I said I have no idea what you're talking about it. Can you explain? What's me being a rookie have to do with this?

This increases variance. Basic statistics anyone? It's a higher mean but also a higher standard deviation. So yes you'll have more negative variance but you'll also have more higher variance. Unless they're just better than you, then it's not variance but your mean that is negative. If you're not a winning player no amount of variance can help you.

Been playing online poker for years. Even after losing over 20k last year, I'm still a six digit winner. I've played so much online poker, I feel I'm capable of making a judgment that in the past two years the negative variance created by the over abundance of constant new faces and bad players, are forcing the expected long term outcome for a good player to ridicules amounts of time to achieve the same. Not that it can't be done, but online achievements are starting to take a back seat to live.


P.S. You said you don't think I know what I'm talking about, not that you don't know what I'm talking about.

I did not say that about poker, I said it about negative variance. Can you define the term variance for me? (Hint: variance has nothing to do with the mean, or expected value). If you understood the concept of variance you would realize that there being a negative and positive variance, and one increasing and the other not increasing just makes no sense mathematically. I don't care how good you are at poker or how much you've won (well I do actually, congrats on that , it's just not relevant to what I'm talking about). I'm talking about math, statistics, and the concept of variance. I don't talk shit without being able to back it up and I don't I talked any shit here either. You are making claims about something that just makes no sense mathematically and I'm going to call you on that every time, because other people may read that and repeat it to all their friends. It's just plain wrong.

No problem,
var·i·ance (vâr'ē-əns, vār'-) Pronunciation Key
n.

1. The act of varying.
2. The state or quality of being variant or variable; a variation.
3. A difference between what is expected and what actually occurs.

lol, I was wondering if you understood it, you had to go to a dictionary to get the definition? Now please relate that definition to poker and explain how there is negative variance and positive variance and how one can be bigger than the other over the long term.

I gave you what you asked for.

Negative variance created by bad players, fish, deep pockets, interruptions like phones, work, family, etc., rookies, all playing poker in one place at one time by the millions, is causing havoc online. The book should be re-written for expected long term outcomes.

But why don't all those things create positive variance? Why only negative variance? You still haven't explained exactly what negative variance in the long term is.

Of course there's winning sessions. But in the past year or two, becoming much more losing ones. As long as your wins are better then your loses of course all is good. But to put in the endless hours online it now takes to be in your favor are becoming not worth it. Especially when live play is proving to be much easier and faster to achieve the same.

And the price of tea in China's going up too, that probably contributes to some of the "negative variance".

This is so far off base that it is almost as ludicrous as you main ideas. ZV's posts are always spot on and show a very deep level of understanding of the game far beyond that of people many times his actual age. There is NO doubt in my mind that having attained the level of knowledge and understanding he has already that he could achieve great things in poker if he decides to stay dedicated to it. I wish that I had that deep of a knowledge of a topic or activity when I was as young.

Long term losing players would love to blame variance/luck for their loses. Have you considered that your initial success was actually POSITIVE variance, and that, in fact, there has NOT been any increase in 'the luck factor' in online poker at all, but rather, your true ability is now manifesting? This seems to me to be far more likely of a scenario.

I have to agree with Zach on this one. Variance is simply deviation from the mean and you can’t increase negative variance without increasing positive variance.

I hear variations of this argument all the time and it essentially boils down to saying it’s harder to win money from fish than it is against good players!

This makes no sense. The basic concept of wining poker is to get your money in the pot in situations where you have +EV. Fish will consistently give you greater +EV situations than good players but also higher variance if you exploit the increased +EV with bigger bets.

The key is to play within your bankroll, play a sufficient volume of hands and adapt to the opponents.

If all else fails and you really find it harder to win against fish, just move up to higher stakes and better players

Good luck to all of you, and don't forget to put a few million dollars away for retirement.

Really well said, pretty much what I was trying to say. I disagree with the last comment as advice, but it seems like you're just saying that anyone who believes they play against better players should just move up in limits to play better players. I still say if being a significantly worse player helps make a profit, sit down at like a $25/$50 NL game. You'll probably be one of the worst players there and thus will be able to suck out more since poker is a 0 sum game minus rake, if the better players get negative variance, the worse players are getting positive variance. Just sit down with your entire bankroll and play at the highest limits you can. (note none of this is serious, I'm trying to point out how silly it sounds that bad players could decrease your expected value, and since variance only applies short-term if your mean winnings are not affected you will win.

Y'all have gone back to talking about fish. I'm not talking about playing against fish/moderates/pros, I'm simply talking about 1 player who "just will" catch good cards that hold up and another player who "just will" catch good cards that get busted.

For example (just an example)...

Given both players have the same skillset and are in VERY similar situations...
out of 1000 times they've had QQ vs AK

Player 1's Q's held up 425 times, but lost 575 times
Player 2's Q's held up 575 times, but lost 425 times

NOTE: I don't know how many times Q's are supposed to hold up, but the above gives it as though it's 50/50 just as an example.

So, in total the Q's held up 50% of the time as they're "supposed to", but player 1 won with them 43% of the time while player 2 won with them 58% of the time. Now put this with different situations where player 1 & 2 start out ahead in 10K/100K hands and just move the decimal and add 0's to the amount of times they held up or not and this is what I'm talking about.

In the long run, over ALL HANDS that are played, maybe the hands which are supposed to hold up do, but maybe they hold up more often for 1 player and less often for another player.

So, the variance is what it's supposed to be for the hands dealt, it's just that 1 player's losing hands were compensated by another players winning hands.

I know a lot of you say "get your money in when you're ahead and you'll be a winner in the long run", what I'm saying is... what if you're just not. There are times when you have to get your $$ in PF and when you feel you're ahead, and when the other players cards turn over you may still be ahead. But, when the flop/turn/river comes it just kills 1 player more than another player.

Does this make sense?

There's no compensating. The definition of random is given any previous condition, the odds will be the same. The past or how other people run or the weather outside or what kind of shoes I'm wearing have no bearing on the likelihood of an A coming on the turn or river.

It makes sense, but the logic's way off. In the long run, the board will not kill 1 player more than another player. Play for a week and that may be possible. But if you have 200k hands from 2 players, I guarantee you they're within 1% of each other in terms of how well they do on coin flips (let's say all QQ vs. AKs instead just so the percentage is fixed). The definition of random is predictable in the long term, not in the short term.

I assume you're asking so you can blame luck rather than your own play. You use pokertracker? If you do, look up pokerEV, some free software that gives you a "luck graph". Assuming you have enough hands (otherwise you can't complain about long-term losing) I think you'll be surprised at how close the amount you win and the amount you were expected to win are.

After about 100k hands (includes all my time online even when I sucked) I'm within $20 of my expected according to pokerEV. Yay, math and stats actually work.

Hermite polynomials - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

lol

No.

In the long run, results will always converge towards the expectancy. Nothing is 'compensated' by anything - each of the two players' hands is an event which is completely independent of all the other hands. This is statistical fact, I really don't know what else to say.

At some point Everyone runs Hot and then Cold,,, if you think everyone runs Hot all the time you got a lot to learn,, NOBODY wins ALL the Time,,
buck

Correct, but there are people who lose ALL the time. But they're great players, they're just the unluckiest players in the world. Just ask them, they'll tell you (note this isn't a slight to the OP, just people in general who talk of how good they are and the only reason they're not rolling in dough is they're the unluckiest person on the planet, met more than a few of those in real life).

I'm not talking about me with this question. For the 1st year or so I was a losing player, but that's because I was learning. As of about the last 6 months I've been holding steady at a dollar amount. Hopefully, with the help of CC, I will start to be a winning player soon.

I'm talking about in general.

For some uncontrollable reason I feel I must add to this.

-The most unlikely event in any random situation will be the statistically perfect event.

-At any 9 handed poker table, over time, you will get dealt the best hand 1/9th of the time (11.111111111111111~%). It is too easy to think that you will get cards once every 9 hands. Statistically statistics can't really even take effect until the sample numbers are much larger than 9 hands, or 90, or really even 900 samples. Though at 900 some trends can begin to appear.

-Against one opponent poker hand odds will stand up over time.

-Everyone tends to ignores or forgets the 'schooling' effect. If against a single opponent you are favored, or against any of many opponents you are favored, if you put all of those opponents together against you, you fall below a 50% expectancy. Think total outs against you.

This being said, OP's original thought about a consistent 51-49 'luck factor' edge are actually within statistical norms until you get close to an infinite number of comparisons.

I am reminded about a California man who has won the California lottery twice.

I have to consider that the OP has a correct thought. I also have to believe that all samples before now have been me being on the underside of the 51-49 split, and that any day now, statistics and nature will force me to the other side!

Good point dj until the end. While it's possible that you could be 49% in coin flips so far, your chances of winning the next coin flip is still 50%. No individual person can have the odds against them in coin flips (real ones, poker-related ones usually aren't 50-50, I'm talking about just a 50-50 random event). So even if up until now you're at 49%, the odds are still 50-50 for the next flip.

The makes me think you understand this, but I thought I'd point this out to people who don't. If you are at 49% over the last hundred thousand hands, the odds are after an infinite amount of time your percentage will approach but never reach 50%. Because the future isn't impacted by running badly in the past, you would have to run well to cross to the other side. It's called regression to the mean.

Absolutely ZACH, however, I put it all in the 'Nature abhores a vacuum' category, and believe that in the end, things do even out. If I didn't believe that, I would have given up the game after my first losing session.

As it works out, I avoid coinflips when they seem apparent to me, and so when I do get in I think (can't prove it) that I am ahead in coinflips.

I have 55,211 hands in my database. Maybe the sample size isn't large enough, but it's got to be a good representation of expected results I'd think.

I've been dealt AA, 212 times. The expected value is 250.959 times.

Do your math and tell me if this is within a normal range statistically speaking.

I had a statistics class in Pharmacy school, but that was so long ago that I only have a basic understanding left.

To get back to the original question, you are correct in that ALL players will either win more or less than their actual statistical expectation.
However, the larger the sample size, the more their actual winnings/losses will trend towards their actual statistical expectation.

For example, if we play a simple coin tossing game where we each bet $1 on heads or tails, after 100,000 tosses it is incredibly unlikely that we are going to be even – one of us will have earned more and the other will have lost more that we would have expected. In this case, if I win 49.5% of the time instead of the expected 50%, I will be down $500.

What is key though, as Zach has said, is that on the next toss I still have exactly a 50% change of winning.

However, if I find a fish that is willing to give me 1.5:1 odds on a coin toss and I play a sufficient amount of times I am essentially guaranteed to be ahead (but still unlikely to ever be exactly the amount ahead as I would expect)

Example 2:
I bet $10 into a pot of $10 with a pair of aces
Villain calls with a flush draw (he is all in, so this ends the betting on the hand)
My expectation for the bet is $14 (win $20 80% of the time and lose $10 20% of the time)
His expectation for the bet is -$4 (win $20 20% of the time and lose $10 80% of the time)
However, everytime we do this one of us will do better than expected and the other will do worse than expected. The more we play, the closer the results will get to the expected 80% / 20% but they are unlikely to ever be exactly right.

Sorry, got a bit carried away with this. To answer the question, yes some people do lose more than they should, but it will be insignificant over a sufficient number of hands with responsible bankroll management.