Poker Winner Blog

Using Statistics to Predict Your Expectations

If you think you can beat the games you intend to play in for a living but aren’t certain, you can use statistics to help you assess what you might expect to win over the long haul. This involves calculating your standard deviation and using it to assess the kind of results you might achieve.

Let’s say that after 900 hours of playing $20—$40 Hold’em, your standard deviation is 20 small bets per hour, which is equivalent to $400. Everyone’s standard deviation is different. Yours will depend on a number of factors, including your playing style, your opponents’, and how aggressive or passive the game is.

Once you become familiar with the concept of standard deviation, you’ll begin to see it as a useful tool for qualifying and describing your hourly winning average. You’ll also realize that poker strategy frequently involves walking a fine line between playing aggressively so as to maximize your win rate, and not taking unnecessary risks in order to minimize the variance or swings you experience.

Assessing Your Risk Tolerance

The answers to so many “How should I play this hand?” questions really depend on your own risk tolerance. And you’re free to choose your playing style; there’s no right or wrong answer. You might be comfortable adopting a playing style designed to yield the highest possible win rate — and along with it, a much higher variance. Or you could win just as much money by playing cautiously, but you’d have to put in more hours at the table to achieve it.

If this seems like an anomaly, it’s not. It’s also the reason why very aggressive, top-notch players — those who take advantage of every edge, no matter how slight, in order to maximize their win rate — run a greater risk of going broke than work-a-day, grind-it-out professionals.

No Licensing Required

No credentials are required to be a professional poker player. No licensing or certification is needed. Anyone can do it. You can jump in if you dare, and who knows, you might succeed beyond your wildest dreams. But if you’d rather take a calculated risk before you give it a go, our advice is to be scrupulous about your recordkeeping and track your standard deviation to provide some perspective on your win rate. And give yourself a fair tryout in your venue of choice before scorching the earth behind you.

Following Good Examples

Playing poker for a living can be a solitary and sometimes lonely experience, and it helps to build relationships you can trust and to find other successful players who can serve as role models. Look at players whose results you admire and try to find out what they do and how they do it. See if you can learn the secrets of their discipline. Find out how they resist the temptation to play marginal hands in bad positions. Learn how they keep from going on tilt, and discover how they exploit the table when they have the best of it.

You’ll find plenty of people you can talk to in any cardroom, but few you can absolutely trust to speak openly, honestly, and truthfully with you. When you find these people, keep those friendships. You can discuss your play and problems with them. You will each improve as a result of reinforcing one another. But you have to be willing to give more than you get in any relationship, and cardroom relationships are no exceptions.

Asking the Right Questions

Some players persist in asking the wrong questions. If you persist in asking, Why can’t I win? Why do I always get the bad beats? Why does the idiot in seat five always win with aces and I always lose with them? You’re asking the wrong questions too. Questions like these are self-defeating because they are based on the paradigm that life at the poker table is beyond your control.

If you change that paradigm to acknowledge that you are responsible for your actions at the card table, you might ask instead: How can I keep applying the winning strategies I’ve learned? What can I do to continue to prepare to win? How can I increase my winnings by recognizing and eliminating the “leaks” in my game?

If you ask the right questions your mind will direct itself to positive suggestions. Once you tell your mind that you do exercise control over your actions, it will suggest strategies based on this assertion. Successful people, and that includes successful poker players, do this routinely.

There’s an old cliché that says, “Poker is a hard way to make easy money.” And it’s true. To be a successful professional poker player you need skill, discipline, strength of character, and the willingness to persevere when everything seems to be going against you and the light at the end of that proverbial tunnel seems to be receding like the view from the back end of a telescope.

But if you have the right stuff you can overcome this. Professional poker can be fun, rewarding, and social; and not many jobs let you set your own hours. You can even promote yourself to bigger games whenever you think you’re ready for the challenge.

Playing poker for a living is not easy. But if you’re realistic about assessing your chances, you might just be able to pull it off.

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