I haven't played a STT in months and this was one of the best videos on the site! Excellent advise for EVERY poker player!

Great series AMT.
You have done an awesome job with those classroom-style videos.
I hope we can expect more from you in future series.

Thank you v.m.

Oh and great series, thanks alot

Hey AMT

Again as you have been told many times in this forum - thx for a great series. Could be so super to make a mtt series, as you mentioned in the end of episode 8 - covering different gameplans - more advanced strategy etc.

Looking forward to that.

Will you publish plans for future vids, so we now when to expect them?

AMT...excellent series, I cant wait for more. MTT or SNG, both interest me.

The Variance part,
15% ROI playing 500 $11 games with a SD of $1250(???)
if we run at 15% ROI we should end up +825
1) 70% we are within 1SD...+$2075 to -$425
2) 90% we are within 2SD...+$3325 to -$1675

is this correct? where did you get the 1250 from? how does one figure SD out?
I find it hard to believe a player with a 15% ROI is down after 500 games.
the higher the ROI the smaller the SD, I think.

I grabbed these numbers off of sharkscope, they are just the bottom number on the leader board page. I have no idea if this is even close but I think the numbers are somwhat useful.
Do you agree with these? I think its important for a sng player to have a realistic goal, and the competition gets more difficult as you go higher, making the ROI possible smaller.

$300+ sng......ROI...4%
$100-$300............5%
$36-$100.............8%
$16-$35.............12%
$6-$15..............15%
$5 and under........20%

The Variance part,
15% ROI playing 500 $11 games with a SD of $1250(???)
if we run at 15% ROI we should end up +825
1) 70% we are within 1SD...+$2075 to -$425
2) 90% we are within 2SD...+$3325 to -$1675

I am not sure where the SD number comes from. (I assume it is from actually data of AMT's play, since the SD number converges fairly quickly and doesn't vary that much based on difficulty.) But I think it should be SD/100 tournaments. So the SD for 500 games would be 1250/sqrt(5) [where sqrt is shorthand for 'square root']. This is approximately 560. If the expected return is 825, then your results should be in the 1 SD interval between 825 - 560 and 825 + 560, i.e between 265 and 1385, about 70% of the time. About 95% of the time, your results will be in a 2 SD interval, that is between 825 - 2*560 = -295 and 825 + 2*560 = 1945.

So yes, in this model, such a player would lose over a 500 tourney sample about 5% of the time. And about 5% of the time, he will show a ROI of 30% or better. That's why you see a lot of people posting in MTT and SNG threads about how they can achieve great ROIs. It's not uncommon to run good for what seems like a long time when you first start playing. It's a good idea for a beginner to be conservative in estimating his true ROI. A player who has a true ROI of, say, 5% can have results that give a 10% or even 15% ROI over a sample of several hundred or even over a thousand tournaments. It can be very disasterous for his bankroll if he decides to allocate his resources as if he actually has a true 10% ROI.

Hope that helps. I think AMT's general guidelines for dealing with variance are on the money, but his explanation of the math involved was not quite so clear. (In fairness, this would have used up a lot of tiem in the video that was put to more useful purposes.) On the other hand, it is not necessarily worth the time investment to learn the math unless you are playing professionally and need to figure out safe bankroll requirements. If you are interested in the math, the places to go are the Chen/Ankemann book Mathematics of Poker and the several threads in 2+2 that deal with this.

bbadboy,

I'm not going to publish any type of schedule too far in advance as that would go against our regiment of not doing that Wouldn't want to have to rush anything out and have it be sub par, but when specific plans come together and come closer, as I have throughout this series, I plan to work with you guys for the next.

sweetjazz3/mickeywins,

thanks for the math run-through. As I've said in other videos, I'm not very well versed in math (ironically), and I often defer to friends and other SNG pros for walk throughs of how the math comes to be there longhand. As sweetjazz pointed out, I felt it important to get you the meaning behind the numbers and the principle of variance being big, and if you're serious about your game, you need to approach it with a proper roll to accommodate that. sweetjazz did a good job of clearing the #'s up and I do apologize if it wasn't detailed enough in the video; again I was going for the core behind applying what the math is telling you, but this:

[quote]Hope that helps. I think AMT's general guidelines for dealing with variance are on the money, but his explanation of the math involved was not quite so clear. (In fairness, this would have used up a lot of tiem in the video that was put to more useful purposes.) On the other hand, it is not necessarily worth the time investment to learn the math unless you are playing professionally and need to figure out safe bankroll requirements. If you are interested in the math, the places to go are the Chen/Ankemann book Mathematics of Poker and the several threads in 2+2 that deal with this.[/quote]

is a good way of looking at it and some good books if you want to look more into the math behind it. Also important to note as an after thought is that when people are playing professionally, generally they are playing turbos and more games at once which definitely results in the noticeably lower ROI (and in theory a higher hourly), so the variance illustrated in the video gets a lot worse over bigger samples, where win rates like that aren't attainable any longer in the context.

Also, Mickey, regarding your estimates of attainable win rates at various levels for turbos, those seem like reasonable estimates for the top players at the given levels.

[quote]Another factor to consider in all this is the "SNG optimal" part.
As more info on how to play better, and even approaching optimal or at least unexploitably is dispursed more widely, the games become more difficult to beat.
This will continue to be the case and the possible ROI will shrink, first at the higher limits but eventually working its way down.
On the positive side..there will always be NEW PLAYERS(hopefully rich..lol), and the will always be LAZY players.
but many of these go broke and dont come back.
my point....get the money while its still available, "easy money" doesn't last forever in any venture.[/quote

great point to consider. and you're right, get it while the gettin's good

This was probably my favorite video of the whole amazing series. Even though this is related to SnG play, I think that the content is applicable to all forms of poker. Some of this stuff has been mentioned in fleeting comments in some other videos, but not once have I seen a video specifically covering these issues. Given that, I think that this is a very good, original, and much needed video.

No matter what your game is: SnG, NL Cash, LHE, Other games, etc, this video is worth a watch.

You really have no excuse either since you could just listen to the audio alone and get a lot from the content (thats what I did on my run this morning).

let me just say its super easy to play 500 sngs in a row losing money no matter what your true ROI is

I dropped 1500 in I think march on ftp playing mostly 12s and some 24s. I don't use the luck programs anymore as I felt it just hurt me more than helped me. If you talk to a lot of winning sng players they have all had some nasty downswings even more than what the models would predict happening.

Nice series AMT

I have really enjoyed the series, but I want more about STT SnGs. Hope new ones will emerge soon. I am especially interested in collecting reads about opponents play, as I have problems with setting handranges in SnGWIZ.

Thanks for the compliments guys; this video in particular didn't really allow me to cover everything I wanted to talk about as far as tilt management, setting a schedule for yourself, and other tools that I've studied and incorporated into my career, but it does a pretty good job and'll point you in the right direction imo

And yes, I definitely have plans to come out with more videos in the near future, but I'm actually in the middle of an apartment move into the city right now, so the next week or two will be rather hectic after traveling + moving. I am very reluctant to hasten a 'sub par' video out in the middle of a move. Hopefully the wait won't be that much longer, but in the mean time, I'll remain active on the tournament forum here and will be around to bitch to when you run bad ldo

And thank you to everyone whose put out suggestions for further video content, always helpful to get opinions on what should to be talked about! DC rules wooooo