Friday, July 3, 2009

Am I a winning player?

A couple of days of run good does wonders for the confidence. Yesterday was a pretty solid $300 winner. Some of it was running good, but I also made some good plays like carefully calculating my outs to call two cold on the turn with bottom pair and a gutshot (catching the gutshot to win a huge pot). I also made a good call with king high to a weird donk bet on the river.

For a long time I have been wondering if I am actually a winning player or not. Obviously I am if you include rakeback and bonuses and all the rest, but I'd really like to think I am winning at the table as well. For a long time my winnings were almost excusively down to bonuses, and I was actually a significant loser at 1/2. At 2/4, initial success succumbed to a massive downswing to take me into negative territory there as well.

Looking afresh at my results over the last six months, I think I can say with moderate confidence that I am a winning fixed limit player at the tables as well now.


A few things to note:
  • I am definitely a LAG. Much looser than bort for example. I am probably verging on Loose/bad at 1/2, perhaps because I am not playing "properly" due to the money being small.
  • 3/6 seems to be a sweet spot, but in general it is interesting that I don't win any more at lower stakes than at those higher stakes.
  • 0.5/1 is down to a huge cooler while trying to qualify for a freeroll ticket on Titan with a very small roll. Why I was playing 0.25/0.50 I have no idea :)
  • HEM only imports Cake hands after May 5th (new file format), and therefore my massive April heater on RedStar isn't included. That should boost the 3/6 stats a bit further when they eventually support the old hand histories.
  • Despite playing quite a lot of hours, I actually play relatively few hands. Many grinders would play this many hands in one month. My preference is to play no more than 3 tables, or 4 at a stretch. I will never comprehend the 12 table grinders.
  • I think it's a fairly representative sample, since it includes the tail end of the huge downswing at the start of the year and the recent downswing as well as the April-May heater.
  • My stats over "all hands" is not nearly as good as these for the last six months. But that just means I'm getting better, right?

4 comments:

L4Y SP said...

That BR is flying . VERY interesting stats . Well done for having the balls to publish the details . Am I a winning player he asks.......well DURRRR. LOL , regards, Adam.

The blindman said...

Lol, durrrr: I wish.

The question is a legitimate one, because if I take all my hands since day 1, I am actually a marginal net loser at 1/2 and 2/4 over quite a lot of hands (though a winner at 3/6 and 5/10 go figure). By far the majority of my BR earnings have come from bonuses, rake races and rakeback. Without those, I would have given up long ago.

parttimebonuschaser said...

the way i figure it, its all income so who cares where it comes from :)

also you'll probably find the euro tables are raking higher effective rates as well

The blindman said...

Yeah, that's true. But if I want to me confident of beating the game live or at Tilt and Stars I need to know that I can comfortably beat the rake and not just the players.

It's true that the Euro tables are higher rake these days. But I'm pretty sure the standard is worse, and of course it's not a big deal when RB+races+bonuses is close to 100%.