Beginners Suck

Being a beginner sucks.

I've just ticked over 50K hands in my PokerTracker database, so I've had a fair amount of experience at being a noob. But does it get any easier? Nope.

Am I a good player? Am I even a winning player? Can you tell after 50,000 hands? Well, not really.

I can tell you that I have an overall winrate of 6.77 ptbb/100. Most people would tell you that's a good rate.

What's the dollar amount? -$346.

So I'm a "winning" player, I just lost a lot of money.


If you haven't already guessed how those two figures fit together: I won money at lower levels over a lot of hands and then lost it quickly at higher levels.
So I have 12K hands at $5NL winning at 28ptbb/100, or 11k at $25NL winning at 0.59 ptbb/100.
Add in another slightly up 4k at $10NL and you see that for over half my hands I've got between a great and an "at-least it's positive' situation.

So where'd the money go. Well, I lost almost $200 at $50NL over just 3k hands, I lost $150 at $2/4 LHE 6-max over just 500 hands.

What do these stats tell me about my play?
Very, very little.

The $5NL stats are fairly solid. I could play another 20k hands with that starting point and I'd have to do very badly to end up with a bad stat. That's a solid base.

11k hands at $25NL just doesn't give enough info.
The BB at that level is $0.50 so getting stacked is a standard -50BB loss. With 10k hands you have 100 * 100 so that equates to a 0.5ptBB/100. So I get stacked next time I'm at the table I go down to dead even.
Get stacked twice suddenly I'm -0.5.

10K is not a lot of hands at NL. 4 buy-ins can go in a session without ever making a wrong call and that will swing you a couple of BB/100 straight away.

So it sucks that I can't tell whether my 4-buy-in loss at $50NL or my 40BB loss at $2/4 SH was due to variance or a major weakness in my play (likely both). My BR can handle these losses at this level, I just have to develop into a player who can too. Part of that will be knowing that it *will* get better, that it's variance and not a chronic leak or three somewhere.

What I'm saying I suppose, is I feel there's no use trying to look at your winrate/record over x-thousand hands and deciding whether to move up or not, or whether you're doing okay at that level.

People are always making poker sound easy "dise is so easy..." or "Party Poker's $25NL is so soft..." or "just play TAG and you'll make loads on this site" and especially with regard to moving up "$10NL is the same as $5NL", "the play at $50NL is the same as $25NL".

The thing is it won't be the same. It may be entirely psychological, but a lot of people struggle at some point with these "easy" transitions.

For me moving up is a question of BR and confidence. Moving up with one without the other is a recipe for disaster, and confidence can't come from the fact that I had 4ptbb/100 over 7k hands at the last level. It has to be confidence with how I'm facing the questions the game is throwing at me.

One thing I would like to stress to my fellow newbies is to stop paying so much attention to their short-term winrates.
People posting how they were so much up over 2k hands and so much down after 2k hands. It really just doesn't matter. I sympathise or commiserate, it's great, it sucks. But we can't make decisions based on it.

I reckon a good rule of thumb would be that your winrate does not matter until your rate doesn't change (more than 0.1) from session to session.


Okay, this was a long rambly post and I don't know if I've said what I wanted to say. Basically I love looking at my stats, I love studying every little number in PokerTracker. It's just that I feel like I'm trying to fine tune the motor of a leaky boat. And I don't think I'm the only one.

I'm with you on this Anosmic. I'll tell ya one thing I figured out thru PT was everytime I moved to $25NL or $50NL I kept thinking, "variance, variance". Turns out one of my better plays at $10NL was a reraise into guys playing 30+VP$P and them folding or at least finding out where I stood. When the roll let me move up, or I just did with 10 or 12 buy-ins when I was feeling rushed or confident, I wasn't raising the same.I wasn't nearly as aggressive. I was folding to raises more often. I was afraid of the amounts. I've always had problems with the management aspect of the game and it has cost me big, because I can beat those levels but without a solid 20+buy-ins and a no fear game I sucked.(i have fixed this leak) When alot of us play at the lower limit we run over other players and we know when resistance is a real hand but with stacks at $6 or $7 we have no fear of losing our buy-in, hell we have $400+ or more after clearing the next bonus, we got money in Neteller backing it up. Hell we're up on 3 other tables a buy-in or more. But goddammit when your at 20 buy-ins at that next level and sitting with a quarter of your roll at the 4 tables, it's very hard to reraise a potsized C-bet with TPMK and a draw. When they have a stack that covers yours. I'm not here to tell you how to beat $25 or $50 NL you know you can, I can, most of us can, easily with what we know. And if you or I had a couple thousand behind us (like Biondino,LOL) and played at $25NL or $50NL, we'd have no fear and run it over with our A game. It's "MENTAL" and you know it. Kick their collective asses.

LOL ... Trainer nailed my experience to a T. 25K+ hands at 25NL ... running around 10PTBB/100 ... go to 50NL and lose 2 buyins ... back to 25NL for awhile ... back to 50NL ... lose 3 buyins. This went on four times and I finally decided to stay at 25NL for now. Just like Trainer says ... I was folding too quickly ... not being as aggressive at 50NL .

Ahh the joys of online poker ....

FYI ... part of my "problem" is that I repeatedly cashed out each month for my car payment. I usually keep about $300-400 in my account. And NO ... I don't want to keep the BR intact because I need to drive to work LOL.

i can tell all the same. i played 50NL at Titan, to get PT from PSO and to clear that bonus, which is quite impossible at their 20NL tables. i said to myself: tighten up, don´t do speculative action and just think of those points. pretty hard, when in that situation ur Kings and Aces won´t hold up. i lost 3 buy-ins, one with my Kings up against Aces, twice my Aces got beat by runner-runner straights against QQ/JJ. In 10 and 25NL i know it´s part of the game, and the next time my premium will hold up, in this case i cleared my PT points and cashed out as fast as possible to prevent me from tilting even more $$ away.

end of the story: just buying PT for 55 bucks would have been +EV

40bb is nothing at limit. suck it up and keep grinding

Originally Posted by Anosmic

What do these stats tell me about my play?
Very, very little.

Quite a lot imo.. you seem to not be able to adapt properly to changes. (most likely changes in playstyle)

Like how I played at prima.. generally people are quite loose there. Then I go to titan, I can't seem to win over 1k hands, wtf? Then it starts to dawn on me, they're all weaktight. So I start raising, cbetting and stealing a lot more.. there we go, winning again. Back to prima, still in the titan mindset.. raise every shiny hand I get, cbet and steal a lot.. running bad again over 1k hands. What on earth? Oh yeah, vs calling stations A2s is not a raising hand! Revert back to playing hands purely on odds and value, and we're off again.

Or 10NL, people just play their hands in a passive manner, bets define a hand most of the time. They reraise? You're beat, just fold. Doesn't matter what they have, probably 2p on their 85s or something. Then on to 20NL, now people suddenly are a lot more aggressive.. time to read flops better and keep better tabs on which people are the aggro ones and which are the passive ones to read their lines.. then 50NL, wow suddenly people are betting just to figure out how I react and then try to use that against me, so I actually need to take that into account..

People are always making poker sound easy "dise is so easy..." or "Party Poker's $25NL is so soft..." or "just play TAG and you'll make loads on this site" and especially with regard to moving up "$10NL is the same as $5NL", "the play at $50NL is the same as $25NL".

It's mostly veterans who have left those stakes behind (so in their memory it's all the same) or people who are running hot atm who say that imho.

I reckon a good rule of thumb would be that your winrate does not matter until your rate doesn't change (more than 0.1) from session to session.

That sounds like a real bad rule of thumb to me. Short-term=very shaky. The more longterm it gets, the closer you approach your actual winrate.

Okay, this was a long rambly post and I don't know if I've said what I wanted to say. Basically I love looking at my stats, I love studying every little number in PokerTracker. It's just that I feel like I'm trying to fine tune the motor of a leaky boat. And I don't think I'm the only one.

Yeah whenever I do that it means I suck at poker. If I notice that I'm checking PO while playing, this voice in my voice says "your attention is waning.. keep this up and you'll get so frustrated that you'll be losing very soon" so then I try to force myself to think about poker strategies to regain my focus. With mixed succes, but it's something.

Started playing again yesterday after a break for more than a month (exams and Tribal Wars - damn Lukie for that second one).. cashed down to the bone again ofcourse.. $70 in an hour play, very nice reentry . But it's all in the grind. It's gonna go up, it's gonna go down.. care about the swings and you lost before you started.

Originally Posted by jackvance

Originally Posted by Anosmic

What do these stats tell me about my play?
Very, very little.

Quite a lot imo.. you seem to not be able to adapt properly to changes. (most likely changes in playstyle)

Perhaps.
Could also just be variance.

Originally Posted by jackvance

Originally Posted by Anosmic

I reckon a good rule of thumb would be that your winrate does not matter until your rate doesn't change (more than 0.1) from session to session.

That sounds like a real bad rule of thumb to me. Short-term=very shaky. The more longterm it gets, the closer you approach your actual winrate.

Which was my point. If you're winrate looks the same after a session whether you're two buy-ins up or two buy-ins down then it's probably stable enough to tell you something. So long as your bb/100 changes with every pot it's fairly unreliable.