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Poker Video: No Limit Hold'Em by threads13 (Micro/Small Stakes)

I just wanted to join the amen corner and say that this is an outstanding video. The information is vital and the presentation was first rate.

Great job sir!

Yes, that seems a bit high to me. I haven't personally seen any 6-max or FR stats that high before. I don't think I can say why it is so high other than you are making some high variance plays.

I don´t want to beat a dead horse, but I want to get it clear for me.

1) As far as I understand it, "high variance" play does not correlate with bad play, correct? I mean, I could have a huge negative bb/100 and still have a low variance, right?

2) What plays do in general support high variance? Aggressive plays or passive plays? I always thought the more aggressive you are the higher variance gets - but I´m more on the passive side, so I´m amazed about my high S.D. Or is it in general playing for too big pots? Could you maybe give an example for a "high variance play"?

I don´t want to beat a dead horse, but I want to get it clear for me.

1) As far as I understand it, "high variance" play does not correlate with bad play, correct? I mean, I could have a huge negative bb/100 and still have a low variance, right?

2) What plays do in general support high variance? Aggressive plays or passive plays? I always thought the more aggressive you are the higher variance gets - but I´m more on the passive side, so I´m amazed about my high S.D. Or is it in general playing for too big pots? Could you maybe give an example for a "high variance play"?

1) A high standard deviation doesn't necessarily equal bad play.
2) Thin plays generally carry with them more variance. If you look into the variance equation you can see that if you have plays that have a low mean as compared to the result and/or you don't have the positive result occur frequently then the variance will rise.

Mine is 97/100 over 50K hands. I'm also not particularly aggr - my 3bet is 7, flop CR 9, mid 30s overall AFq.
Based on my own leaks, I would guess it has something to do with taking call down lines where betting or raising is more +ev and/or calling too much.

Just finished this first episode, I made notes by pausing every slide and taking the important points down and I feel its really stuck in my head. I look forward to the rest of the series, especially the learning chunks, plans and routines.

Good video so far. Only about half way through and I like all of the information provided. I was just going to ask a fairly dumb question.

Are your presentations available for download? I'd like to have a hard copy that I can follow along with and jot notes for further reference. Being as I have been out of college for almost three years this plethora of information is a bit overwhelming as well.

Thanks in advance!

yes, i must say that this video is giving some light into statistics for someone who dont know statistics

I must recon the helpness of it, and thank the producer for that.

i must also comment that the producer drives some things into extremes, and i dont like that because i believe that i understand statistics alittle more than average people.

questions

why do you need to make all examples for 99.5 confidence ( 3 sd's from the mean) and cannot stop at 2 sd's at least ( 95% ) especially if you are dealing here with poker players who will not care ( be reasonable here) about if they dealing with 99.5% of their total result or only 95% of it?.

Make a parallel between this line and estimating their equity in any hand, do they care if they have equity of 99% or just 90%.

Now, the difference between 3sd and 2 sd is enormous in statistics ( some people will not find one sd being so enormous, but they are not understanding stats as they should if they play poker.

In one example you take 13.8% two times the extremes make it 30% and now, the fact that 13.8+13.8=27.2 doesnt matter anymore 2.8% away from the truth, but you push 3sd instead of 2sd's for 3,5% away from truth. From a statistical point of view you made a great error by adding statistical results of 2 different extreme results of an experiment + and - and turning it into one single explanation of the whole. but that's another story, of a man standing with one man on the burning stove and another man in the ice water and saying on average he is ok.

if you make that for your examples it would be 3.5% less accurate, but you would not scare people so much with the results with 2 sd's.

And i presume your intentions are to give people a real understanding not a scary understanding of variance in poker.

Not to mention the situations where some people would like to see a 68% confidence which is the bulk of their results in time

again, nice series, thak you

yes, i must say that this video is giving some light into statistics for someone who dont know statistics

I must recon the helpness of it, and thank the producer for that.

i must also comment that the producer drives some things into extremes, and i dont like that because i believe that i understand statistics alittle more than average people.

questions

why do you need to make all examples for 99.5 confidence ( 3 sd's from the mean) and cannot stop at 2 sd's at least ( 95% ) especially if you are dealing here with poker players who will not care ( be reasonable here) about if they dealing with 99.5% of their total result or only 95% of it?.

Make a parallel between this line and estimating their equity in any hand, do they care if they have equity of 99% or just 90%.

Now, the difference between 3sd and 2 sd is enormous in statistics ( some people will not find one sd being so enormous, but they are not understanding stats as they should if they play poker.

In one example you take 13.8% two times the extremes make it 30% and now, the fact that 13.8+13.8=27.2 doesnt matter anymore 2.8% away from the truth, but you push 3sd instead of 2sd's for 3,5% away from truth. From a statistical point of view you made a great error by adding statistical results of 2 different extreme results of an experiment + and - and turning it into one single explanation of the whole. but that's another story, of a man standing with one man on the burning stove and another man in the ice water and saying on average he is ok.

if you make that for your examples it would be 3.5% less accurate, but you would not scare people so much with the results with 2 sd's.

And i presume your intentions are to give people a real understanding not a scary understanding of variance in poker.

Not to mention the situations where some people would like to see a 68% confidence which is the bulk of their results in time

again, nice series, thak you

My intentions were actually to show the extremes, so that why I decided to go with 99% confidence intervals in general. The idea was to show players who have little background in this information how bad/good things can get because I feel that most player's have an inaccurate assessment of how extreme variance can be. So, for education purposes, I thought it was best to show the extremes so that it would be more dramatic and make the point stick. Extreme examples are easier to conceptualize and remember. Also, most players tend to underestimate variance so to counter that, I wanted to show the extreme variance. As a whole, the community underestimates variance, so I felt it better to show the other side of the coin to mitigate that. In your particular case, this series was slightly missing the target audience since you have a background in this material.

The example you gave of rounding 2*13=26 to 30 is true, but I favored simplicity and rounding in that particular example as to make things a little easier for the listener. Again, this is for educational purposes and was oversimplification/too inaccurate for someone with a background. Maybe that's a little bit too much liberty to take (and I can see that), but I don't think it detracts from my mission; which was to show players the math behind variance, show players how extreme variance can be (as mentioned above, this is why I showed the extremes), and to show players how to deal with variance. As for my examples as a whole, I feel like I hit the point really well. Of course, it's hard to be perfect, so I'm sure there are things I could have done better.

Furthermore, I've shown how the math is done, and provided many examples so if people want to use one of my 99% CI examples and look at a 68% CI example, it's a pretty easy to and/subtract 2SD's from my results. I think I mention in the series "if you don't like my numbers, try it with your own" and that is one of my main goals of the series - to encourage people to these calculations on their own. So, the 68% is easy for anyone to calculate and didn't really work with the theme I was trying to hit, to show the extremes, so I didn't bother with it. I think my examples were mostly fair and pointed. I didn't think it was necessary to do that for each example when I wanted to look more at the extremes that the average poker player (imo) underestimates.

This is really interesting. I just looked at my current database which is smaller, but I just got rid of my old one which was 250k hands plus. And my S.D. is 98. I play all 6max NLHE. This makes sense to me because It has always seemed like I was on a sick heater or playing horribly and losing. It's seems as I'm either winning for 20k hands at 45bb/100 and then losing at 44bb/100 for the next 20k hands. Now I just need to figure out what the high variance plays and I'm making are! Thanks again.

Time Link to 00:20:18

Is the s.d/50k calculation right here? or is it supposed to be .02684? Thanks!

Is the s.d/50k calculation right here? or is it supposed to be .02684? Thanks!

nevermind.....total retard here.

Been watching this for my "Math Attacks" series.

I have a question, in your presentation you treat your winrates as all equally likely. However, this is not the case, as they caveated in Chapter 3 of the book "mathematics of poker". It is much more likely that you win at a lower winrate than a higher winrate. So while the Gaussian tells us that it's just as likely that "the dude" wins at 10bb/100 as 6bb/100 this is simply not true via Bayesian inference. This also helps with the fact that we don't have to play such huge amount of hands to be certain we are winning players, stats converge much quicker.

Thoughts?

Been watching this for my "Math Attacks" series.

I have a question, in your presentation you treat your winrates as all equally likely. However, this is not the case, as they caveated in Chapter 3 of the book "mathematics of poker". It is much more likely that you win at a lower winrate than a higher winrate. So while the Gaussian tells us that it's just as likely that "the dude" wins at 10bb/100 as 6bb/100 this is simply not true via Bayesian inference. This also helps with the fact that we don't have to play such huge amount of hands to be certain we are winning players, stats converge much quicker.

Thoughts?

Yeah, I'm actually thinking of doing another episode to tie together some of this stuff with Bayes', but it was a little bit out of the scope of what I was trying to show in this series. I was more trying to show the extremes of variance and decided not to wade into anything Bayes' related for sake of simplicity. I was trying to give more black or white examples that people who don't know much about variance would get a lot from. Maybe I overstated it, but I'm kind of ok with that given that so many poker players are severely underestimating variance. But yes, good point that I probably should have mentioned as an aside.

I was more trying to show the extremes of variance and decided not to wade into anything Bayes' related for sake of simplicity.

As someone who only understands math in baby steps, I thank you for the simplicity

Yeah, I'm actually thinking of doing another episode to tie together some of this stuff with Bayes', but it was a little bit out of the scope of what I was trying to show in this series. I was more trying to show the extremes of variance and decided not to wade into anything Bayes' related for sake of simplicity. I was trying to give more black or white examples that people who don't know much about variance would get a lot from. Maybe I overstated it, but I'm kind of ok with that given that so many poker players are severely underestimating variance. But yes, good point that I probably should have mentioned as an aside.

No problem, great videos so far from what I have seen!