need advice on meaningful profitability

Okay, my cold streak seems to be turning around, and I'm starting to believe that variance is real and I'm not merely cursed to lose all my life. So now I'm starting to think about what it would take for me to, maybe, someday, be profitable. I am not prepared to sacrifice entertainment value and my enjoyment of the game for the sake of merely breaking even or making piddly pennies in profit; the profit has to have some minimal meaning and make at least some minor difference to my life in order for me to agree to be more serious about poker and not just in it purely for the fun of losing. The bottom limit for me would be a cashout of $100 per month, as well as profit of $100 per month that stays in my bankroll in order to keep building it, so I'd be aiming, as an initial goal, to make a profit of $200 per month on poker.

Since I'm already comfortable four-tabling six times a day for a total of 24 STTs per day (it takes only about three hours of total playing time) and am comfortable playing every single day until fatigue forces me to take a break, my calculation is that I'd need to make an average of between 50 and 55 cents profit per tourney--every single tourney I play, including the ones I don't finish ITM in--in order to meet this financial goal. So far my ITM rate at the $3 party poker 10-man STTs has been about 25%, but I've also had about 25% bubble finishes in 4th or 5th place, so with a little improvement on the bubble rate and a slight skew toward 1st place finishes as opposed to 2nds and 3rds, it's doable.

What I really need to know is what limit I should set my sights on. To figure that out, I need to know the kinds of ROIs and ITM rates that profitable players typically have at the various limits. Does anyone want to help out?

EDIT: Okay, so my math was messed up. Assuming six days a week or 24 days a month at 24 STTs per day, that's 576 STTs per month, so I'd need 34.72 cents average profit per every one of those 576 STTs in order to meet my goal. What kind of ROI and ITM rates would that require at what limits?

It's not difficult math. For example, since you've figured out that if you play 576 games, your avg profit has to be 0.35, you can plug in different buyin levels to determine what your ROI has be; e.g. 0.35 avg profit / 5.50 buyin = 6.4%.

ITM isn't particularly relevant in this regard.

Arjonius said:

It's not difficult math. For example, since you've figured out that if you play 576 games, your avg profit has to be 0.35, you can plug in different buyin levels to determine what your ROI has be; e.g. 0.35 avg profit / 5.50 buyin = 6.4%.

ITM isn't particularly relevant in this regard.

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So the simple math tells me that, at my current $3 limit, I need a ROI of about 12% in order to achieve my short-term goal. But I have no idea whether the goal of a 12% ROI at $3 STTs is realistic, or unrealistically high, or unrealistically low. Can you comment on that?

I also need to know how many STTs I need to play at a 12% ROI before I can be reasonably sure that it's really my ROI rather than short-term variance. Same with a 1% or -5% ROI, and with a 40% ROI, because I expect the reliable STT number size sample would be different for each ROI. Unless I'm wrong and the size of the sample is the same for every ROI. Please advise.

I wonder at your statement that you do not want to give up the entertainment value of the game, vs you essentially saying you are willing to grind. Grind does not equate with entertainment.

If you stay on the entertainment side of the equation, then realistically, you may miss your goals far more often than you meet those goals, but you will have had a lot of fun doing it, with little stress.

From the tone of your post, I can't help but think that as soon as you set those goals, your entertainment days are over, and you have created a work schedule. This is not to suggest you abandon those goals, rather to be ware of the impending changes to your attitude about the game.

dj11, the grinding does not FEEL like grinding to me right now. I'm never going to put myself in a position where I am obliged to play when I don't want to, so I'll do what looks like grinding only as long as I'm enjoying it, take a break when I stop enjoying it, and come back to it when I feel like doing it again. The only thing that could change that is an ROI of 50% or more over six months of steady play totalling about 100,000 hands. If something that extreme happened, then I'd have to face up to the fact that I have a chance at a future as a professional poker player, and I'd have to give it serious thought. Otherwise, I'm never to let myself become depdendent on poker, so I'll never find myself being forced to play when I don't want to.

So maybe someone can finally answer the question I keep asking and people seem not to notice me asking: is a 12% ROI at the $3 tables realistic, or is it unrealistically high, or is it unrealistically low?

SolaRoe said:

So maybe someone can finally answer the question I keep asking and people seem not to notice me asking: is a 12% ROI at the $3 tables realistic, or is it unrealistically high, or is it unrealistically low?

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It's certainly feasible in that there are people who run at this rate and higher.

But the real question is how feasible it is **for you*. This encompasses a number of factors - how much natural talent you have, your willingness to work on your game, your ability to learn, how you manage your roll, etc.

IMO, it doesn't take a great player to run 12% at the $3 level, but I don't have enough info on your game to guess if / how soon you can.

Arjonius said:

It's certainly feasible in that there are people who run at this rate and higher.

But the real question is how feasible it is **for you*. This encompasses a number of factors - how much natural talent you have, your willingness to work on your game, your ability to learn, how you manage your roll, etc.

IMO, it doesn't take a great player to run 12% at the $3 level, but I don't have enough info on your game to guess if / how soon you can.

Click to expand...

Follow-up question: What size sample of STTs is enough to establish fairly reliably that you aren't just experiencing variance and really do have a ROI of:

1) -40%
2) -5% to +5%
3) +12% (my goal)
4) +40%

It depends. You can have the same "natural" ROI with different degrees of volatility. The greater that is, the larger the sample size required to reach statistical significance, so there isn't a pat answer for everyone.

The more your natural ROI diverges from the mean in either direction, the sooner you should feel subjectively that you're solidly +EV or -EV. You won't have a statistically significant ROI number until your sample size is larger, but if your natural ROI is unusually high or low, you'll know the direction well before your sample is large enough to give you a statistically significant number.

SolaRoe said:

Okay, my cold streak seems to be turning around, and I'm starting to believe that variance is real and I'm not merely cursed to lose all my life. So now I'm starting to think about what it would take for me to, maybe, someday, be profitable. I am not prepared to sacrifice entertainment value and my enjoyment of the game for the sake of merely breaking even or making piddly pennies in profit; the profit has to have some minimal meaning and make at least some minor difference to my life in order for me to agree to be more serious about poker and not just in it purely for the fun of losing. The bottom limit for me would be a cashout of $100 per month, as well as profit of $100 per month that stays in my bankroll in order to keep building it, so I'd be aiming, as an initial goal, to make a profit of $200 per month on poker.

Since I'm already comfortable four-tabling six times a day for a total of 24 STTs per day (it takes only about three hours of total playing time) and am comfortable playing every single day until fatigue forces me to take a break, my calculation is that I'd need to make an average of between 50 and 55 cents profit per tourney--every single tourney I play, including the ones I don't finish ITM in--in order to meet this financial goal. So far my ITM rate at the $3 Party Poker 10-man STTs has been about 25%, but I've also had about 25% bubble finishes in 4th or 5th place, so with a little improvement on the bubble < you mean a little improvement on basically the main part of SNG play? Is that what you're talking about here? rate and a slight skew toward 1st place finishes as opposed to 2nds and 3rds, it's doable.

What I really need to know is what limit I should set my sights on. To figure that out, I need to know the kinds of ROIs and ITM rates that profitable players typically have at the various limits. Does anyone want to help out?

EDIT: Okay, so my math was messed up. Assuming six days a week or 24 days a month at 24 STTs per day, that's 576 STTs per month, so I'd need 34.72 cents average profit per every one of those 576 STTs in order to meet my goal. What kind of ROI and ITM rates would that require at what limits?

Click to expand...

Instead of making these calculations based on what isn't happening. Why not put the time into learning how to get better. Focus on learning how to play optimally, & the money will look after itself. Then once you've learned how to play optimally (& continue to work on it) you'll be able to see if it's worth it.

Typically ITM rate for winning player in 9man STT-SNG is ~40%. (if it matters). Seeing the JTs hand raised pre to 4x over multiple limpers while OOP, I think you might want to focus your efforts on learning how to play SNG's, rather than calculating perceived future profits that aren't happening. (btw, BB is OOP... even if you happen to think it isn't). -40% is highly probably to be your True ROI if you really play like the HH you've posted on forum.

In the theme of 'poker is a non-ending game', sample size gets a funny rap. If you're a casual enthusiast who plays intently one night a week (online) after work, a significant sample size would be based on maybe a month's worth of hands and results. Longer would obviously be better, but 1 month is gonna give you enough to begin to understand things.

If you are grinding out 1000 hands a day, then maybe that same 1 month's worth of hands would again hold true, so 30K hands.

While I know about stats, and significant sample sizes, I disagree with how people tell us we need huge sample sizes before we can intelligently use those stats. Those static stats tell us history, and might suggest trends in static situations, but we want a more dynamic sample size to be useful.

In most cases I think a time based sample size is better.

Case in point, I have thousands of hands on many CC players for several years worth of play. I know these players are improved over those years, and if I use 1000 hands against player x to evaluate how they are playing today, I am screwing myself. I only need maybe their last 100 hands against me to get a much more accurate read on them. Likewise, if I use my lifetime stats on myself for some self-evaluation, I will be getting stats from when I didn't know or use this or that tactic, and again, will be screwing myself.

So a month's worth (IMHO) of stats for either them or myself, will give me a fine sample size to evaluate either their play, or my own. You can evaluate your own play, via a tracker, by isolating hands into time based sets, and then compare different time based sets against each other. So you could compare your hands of Oct 2001, against your play in May 2012.

So I start most games with full stats showing on my HUD (when I use it), and about 50 hands in, I change my HUD to show the last 50 hands, and keep adjusting those number to show how both they and I are playing now.

If you play random games and mostly see random player, you won't have many hands (if any) against a large majority of the folks at your tables, and any HUD info you see will be small sample stuff that is still useable.