Poker EV and All In Luck
Monday, January 21, 2008
By: Acevader
I'm aware that I've mentioned the program "Poker EV" before but I thought I'd explain what the "all in luck" function of the program calculates to hopefully highlight why I have, in the past, found it so difficult to put in reasonable hours at poker.
Poker EV, as with most of these types of programs, reads your poker tracker database and produces a whole host of different graphs and glossy stats for the players to salivate over. One of these stats is your all in luck and this is calculated by examining your pot equity within any pot where you got your money all in with cards still to be dealt and comparing that equity to the result of the hand. It will then tell you whether you are running on, above or below expectation for the day/week/month, etc. A simple example:
I play one hand of poker on a given day and get dealt AA with a $50 stack and get it in preflop vs someone that covers me holding KK - we'll assume no rake. If I win this hand I will win a $100 pot for a total of $50 profit. However, my pot equity is only 82% preflop meaning that 'on average' I would only expect to win $82 for $32 profit. If, after playing and winning this hand, I ran it through poker EV it would show that I'm +$18 for my all in luck. This is because I won the entire pot when, mathematically speaking, I was only entitled to 82% of it. As a result if you have a day where your hands are holding up well you will usually have a positive number and if you are being heavily drawn on a negative number. This function of Poker EV can be useful to check that any bad run you are on is actually as a result of unfortunate luck beyond your control.
As I have said before, the primary reason for me failing to put in big hours since I turned pro is fear. Frankly speaking I'm so used to get nailed at poker when I put my money in good that I'm shit scared to play it. January has been different and that is because I categorically promised that I'd put the hours in no matter what. What follows is my all in luck for each day I've played in January:
7th: -$83
8th: +$174
9th: -$100
10th: +$26
11th: +$4
12th: -$10
13th: -$330
14th: -$401
15th: -$307
16th: -$195
17th: -$288
18th: -$78
19th: -$201
20th: +$125
21st: -$162
That little lot totals -$1826 and changes my January win rate from a theoretical (if all in luck = zero) 3.5ptbb/100 to an actual 1.38ptbb/100. You will also note that I ran below expectation on 11 out of 15 days and this is pretty much the 'way of things' for me and has been since August. In actual fact it has been years longer but I didn't have Poker EV back then so I can't prove that. It's the sitting down each day to grind my ass off and being bum raped far more than my fair share that cracks my spirit to put in the hours: this is the reason I averaged 12.5 hours per week from Aug-Jan.
Hopefully this will give my readership some understanding of why I have appeared so disheartened by poker and have apparently been so lazy. I'd also like to take this opportunity to pat myself in the back for getting up tomorrow to log another 4-5 hours knowing that I will almost certainly be drawn on relentlessly and lose more than my fair share.
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