Math Keeps Me Sane

It would be easy for me to get discouraged.  Lately, I'm playing poker but not making any money.  I'm building up small amounts of money that I had sitting on two online poker sites, so that I can get my bankrolls big enough to make some money.  In live tournaments I haven't cashed in several months.

There are good explanations for this.  First and foremost, after several tries at being a full-time poker player, this year is the first real chance that I've had to make it happen.  In 2014 and 2015 I lived with my mother-in-law every week, 3-4 days a week, as her caregiver.  The family started with a rotation of two or three people doing that job, and two years later I was the only caregiver left standing because all of the other family members were, in their own words, burned out.  I never signed up to be doing it by myself and I quit.  Someone outside the family is now doing that job.

What really made that situation hard to deal with was that I wound up spending all of that time as a caregiver because a family member said I should do it because "I didn't have a job"  and I didn't speak up.  I should not have been silent.  I should have said that poker is my job.  But once I said yes, I was going to fulfill that commitment.  I had no idea I would be doing it for two years, but once I commit myself to something I don't quit.

Starting in February of this year, poker was finally my one and only job--but I'm starting all over again, after not getting the proper play or study time in for the last two years.

So, what does math have to do with this?  It tells me that this is normal.  Some players start out as big winners, then the reality check comes and they don't get anywhere for a while.  Some are just the opposite.  Like me, they do the studying and the other work, but they don't get results right away.

There are two mathematical concepts at play here, statistical variance and sample size.

Statistical variance says that over a small sample size a player's results do not indicate how good that player is.  A good player can play ten or more tournaments, sometimes many more, and not cash in any of them.  That's called negative variance.  A bad player can, over those same ten or more tournaments, cash in several of them, because he got a good run of cards or for other reasons.  That's positive variance.

To put in simply, poker is a long-term game.  It takes a while, a statistically valid sample size, for the cream to rise to the top.  To give an extreme example, in his first season on the World Poker Tour, Jonathan Little finished down fifty thousand dollars.  The next year, he was up over a million.  Little is now a two-time WPT Player of the Year.

That's pretty extreme variance, but I'm not competing against the best players in the world. so my edge over the field won't be as small at Little's.  As I have the chance to play more and more live tournaments, which is my main focus, after 25 or 50 or 100 tournaments, at some point the results will be there.  I spend 25% of my poker time on study every week.  I watch coaching videos.  I read and study poker books.  I make flash cards to memorize different hand ranges and other things that I need to memorize, for example, which hands are in the top 20%.  For those who want to know, those hands are:

66+,A4s+,K8s+,Q9s+,J9s+,T9s,A9o+,KTo+,QTo+,JTo

A few of the people that I play against are probably doing that kind of studying.  Most aren't.  Very few have poker as their only job,  My last two tournaments I finished 26th of 72 and 8th of 34.  I'm going deep enough often enough that I know I'm close to making things happen.  Even more important, every tournament that I play I can see where I've improved and where I need to improve,  I learn from every tournament and the more I play, the better I'll get.  It's only a matter or time, or to put in another way, playing enough tournaments that I have a large enough sample size that short-term variance is not an issue.