Warning: This will most likely turn into a long boring blog unless you either find humor in my misery or you are into poker stats.
I recently purchased and downloaded the newest poker database software, Hold'em Manager. They have a very cool new feature in this software that calculates your all-in equity. For those of you that don't know what all-in equity is (Don't worry mom and dad, I am sure there are several of my poker friends that need this explanation too) or how to figure it out I will do my best to explain what it means.
Your equity in a hand is equal to the amount of the pot that you are supposed to win considering the chance of your hand winning the pot. For example if you and your opponent both put $1,000 into an otherwise empty pot it would contain $2,000 to go to the winning hand. If you were holding pocket Aces and they were holding pocket Kings you would have about an 80% chance of winning the pot and your opponent would have a 20% chance. Therefore, your equity in the hand is $1600 and that is how much you you would get back if you got what you deserved. However, it doesn't work like that in poker you either get the entire pot or none of the pot. So, if your pocket Aces held up and you won the entire $2,000 your winnings would be $1,000 for the hand, but you would have profited $400 more than you deserved to. Basically your all-in equity stat disregards the actual results of the hand and keeps track of how much you should win by calculating your equity in all the hands were you got all your money in with more cards to come.
So, analyzing your all-in equity stat is one way you can somewhat measure how lucky you have been in the past. You compare the actual amount of money that you have won to the amount that your all-in equity says you have won. If you have won more actual money than it says you should have one then you are getting lucky more than your fair share of the time. For example: Maybe your pocket aces have held up when you were up against pocket kings 90% of the time instead of the 80% they are supposed to during the last year of your poker playing. This would result in you winning more money than you deserved to and your actual winnings would be higher than your all-in equity says you should be.
So onto the bad news....I had to let Hold'em Manager run all night long so that it could import the almost 350,000 hands I have saved on my computer. This all-in equity stat was the main reason that I switched to this software. I swear I had dreams about what my graph was going to look like when I finally got to see it. So, when I got up this morning it was done importing and I fired up my graph and MUCH to my dismay my database showed me that I had actually won around $77,000 and my all-in equity said that I should have won around $55,000. You may be thinking to yourself....Congratulations, you were lucky to have won more than your share! While it is true that I did get lucky over the last year of playing online that is devastating to my confidence. I was already a little bummed out over my win rate being as low as it was, but now come to find out I have just been getting lucky all along just to keep my win rate where it was! I mean what if I would have gotten as unlucky as I got lucky? I would have actually won about $33,000 over the last year. That is some scary stuff. People always discuss how many hands it takes to get a true win rate. Well, I am here to tell you that the number is somewhere way above 350,000. I am always the first person to discount anything someone says when they are complaining about running bad, because everyone has been through tough stretches of poker. This new discovery has me reeling though....maybe I haven't really ever run bad compared to other poker players?
I feel like I could never do a good enough job of explaining how discouraging finding something like this out is. I feel like I have been duped into thinking I am a great poker player (I don't even think I am great) by just having a lucky run of cards over the last 350,000 hands when in actuality my stats show that I should be considerably less successful than I have been. I have put in a lot of work on my poker game in invested a lot of time and feel like I deserve all of the results I have gotten, but apprently that just isn't the case.
I think this would be the equivilant of someone training for a marathon for one years time with a specific time based goal in mind. This time goal of theirs would be one that would be very well respected by their running peers and impressive if accomplished. Imagine that they trained on the same marathon course by theirself for the entire year and they had mile markers set up along they way so they could keep track of their time splits and their progress throughout the year. Finally, near the end of their year of training they were getting very close to reaching the time goal and they were ready to run in the big race the following weekend. Then just to be sure that everything was on the up and up and to be safe they measured the course and mile markers they had been training on all year and as they measured them they realized that every mile marker was only .9 miles away from the next one and their entire course was only 23.5 miles instead of the normal 26.2 miles!
How do you think their ability to perform in the marathon would be affected? I don't think they would even be able to run the first 23.5 miles as well as they had been running it during training. They would have no confidence in theirself and they would be worried about being outed by their peers as being a fraud.
This is getting retardedly long so I am going to stop writing and maybe write more about this tomorrow or another time. It is safe to say that my confidence is slightly rattled and I am not too happy that my results didn't deserve to be as good as they ended up being (and to think that I was disappointed with my FALSE win rate!).
Sigh...bed time
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