October is Over!

Well what a month October was.  As for Real Fun .. well the last half of October that attitude took quite a beating!  I try not to bleat about bad beats and running cold etc … but seriously, I think I really, really ran as bad as possible towards the end after what was a really positive start to the month.  So often I made second best hand, I’d make trips on the river only for that card to make villian a straight.  I ran terribly in coinflips as well, and lost count of the number of times I got done with hands like AK vs AQ.  To demonstrate, here is October’s graph.  Take a look at results vs all-in EV….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It really was tough.  You go through periods in poker where you run well and it seems like an easy game.  Then you go through these sort of periods and you think will I ever win a hand again?  I went back through the database and was generally quite happy that I didn’t play many (I can’t say none) hands poorly or tilt.  The vast majority were genuine coolers or bad beats.  But of course it got me to thinking about how many hands do you have to play before the “luck” factor evens itself out and the skill edge begins to really show.  People talk about certain amounts of hands … whether it is 10k, or 50k, or 100k.  But doing some surfing, I found this excellent post and analysis that really tries to look at how many hands you have to play before you get within 1% of your true win rate.  Short summary:  MILLIONS of hands.  So who said poker is a skill game?  Yes it is, but the long run is really much, much longer than people think.  It always gets me steamed up when people try to say variance doesn’t exist and if you are down more than 10 buyins you are just playing bad.  Well it’s fairly clear that this isn’t the case, its very easy, indeed extremely likely if you play enough hands that you will have a run where you just get coolered and bad beat relentlessly.  For any serious player, I strongly recommend you take a look at the link and read the article through.  It really did help me understand the nature of variance and strengthen my belief that I just had to keep playing solid poker.

So here’s hoping November is a little more positive.  Still having fun, I’m now six tabling 25nl on a regular basis and really enjoying it.  The rakeback alone is nice, so break-even poker is quite profitable, although it would be nice to do better than that!  I’d like to get 50k hands in this month, and lets see if we can try and get that results line a little closer to EV   Good luck at the tables all.