The seemingly simple and easy to beat exercise, which I invented to stave of rust while in the jungle, turned out not so simple or so easy as I had thought. In fact, the bottom line is I got my butt handed to me on a platter.
As a brief review, I played sessions of 25 hands of poker. I rotated through 7 different poker variations lasting one session each. The game was three handed with all three players posting $0.25 blinds. Player A and Player C always completed to $1.00 and were effectively all-in for the hand. I, Player B, had the choice of either completing to $1.00 also and being all in or folding and losing my $0.25 cent blind. Theoretically, if I called every hand and completed the $1.00 bet, I would break even as would players A and C. However, to beat the game, I would have to fold whenever I did not have a starting hand that was good enough to win 1 out of 3.
I would have expected the final results after almost 1000 hands to show that I had made a small profit while players A and C had divided their losses evenly between the two. I was in no way prepared for the results that came.
875 Hands
Player A: -$33.31
Player B: -$21.50
Player C: +$54.81
How the hell did I lose so much money in a game where if you call every hand, you are supposed to break even? And how come Player A and Player C show such disparate results even though they always acted in the exact same manner? I even was meticulous enough to rotate dealers so that no one would be dealt first more often than another.
I have attempted to analyze my results. I needed to find a reason for my poor performance other than the poor defense of the luck excuse to separate me from the harsh reality of how poorly I had been playing.
I broke down my profit per game. I broke down my folding % per game. I also broke down my profit per session and my folding % per session.
Logically, I assumed that I did poorly because I was either folding too often or too little and that the results would reflect this once I broke things down. I also assumed it would be too much since folding too little should push me closer to breaking even. Yet in the two games where I showed a profit (Razz +$19.75 and 7 Card Stud +$11.50) I folded at a higher rate than my average folding % (39.2% and 30.4% vs. my average 27.5%). However, it did not explain how in 5 Card Stud and Holdem I also folded at a greater rate yet came up on the losing side, especially since I lost more in Holdem than in any of the other games. The same could be said when I examined folding % over my session totals. My 6 most profitable sessions showed me folding as often as 48% or as little as 4% with an average of 24%. Yet my 6 least profitable sessions had a max folding percentage of 32% and a min of 4%. The average for these was a little higher than 21%. This is hardly a huge difference and probably not a significantly significant one (read I am too lazy to run a real statistical analysis on my results).
With differences in folding not an acceptable answer, I turned to differences within game types for my salvation. I found a little more success here. In communal card games I did horribly. I lost in all three: Holdem, Omaha, and Omaha 8+. In Stud Games I only won in 2 of them but I still showed an overall profit (7 Card Stud +$11.50; Razz +$19.75; 7 Card Stud H/L -$11.00; 5 Card Stud -$2.75). Further, when I took a look at my session results I found similar results. Of my top grossing sessions, 7 of 8 were in Stud games. When I looked at my bottom grossing sessions, I found that 6 of 8 were in Communal Card games and that the lone detractors, which included my worst overall session, were both 7 Card Stud H/L sessions.
I took it one step further now that I realized that I had such a big difference in Stud and Communal Card games. I looked at my folding %’s within these two subsets. In 7 Card Stud H/L I was a significant loser and I folded a significant % less than in the other three Stud games. I only folded 16% of the time in 7 Card Stud H/L vs. 39.2%, 31.2%, and 30.4% in Razz, 5 Card Stud, and 7 Card Stud respectively. Perhaps my folding or rather my lack of it did have some affect on how well I did.
Things were less clear with Communal Card games. First I ranked them by how much I lost. #1 was Holdem with -$18.50, then Omaha with -$13.25, then Omaha 8+ with -$7.25. But when I looked at folding %, there was not a big difference (28.8% vs. 23.2% vs. 24%) outside of the fact that it was much lower than 3 of the 4 Stud games.
Looking back at all this, I realize just how different Stud and Communal Card games really are. Playing Stud, it is much easier to determine from your starting hand just where you stand. They are games where starting hand selection is crucial. This is much different from Communal Card games where while having good starting hands helps, it is not a necessity and is also harder to gauge. Looking back at all this, I also realized just how ill thought out my exercise was. I created a game where I would try to exploit a small edge. However, I overlooked the fact that small edges could take thousands of hands, not hundreds to manifest visibly within your results. I sorely wish I had the mathematical genius or the computing skills to figure out what the proper fold % should be so that I could compare it with mine.
Finally, and what I consider to be the take-home lesson from all this, the degree to which luck and chance affected the results floors me. By all means, if I had played better, I would have had better results. But that says nothing about Players A and C. They played exactly the same way and never deviated yet their results could not have been more different. A gap of almost $90 separates the two of them after almost 1000 hands. I would have expected things to settle down and at least appear to approach similarity. Perhaps my logic is flawed and there is a reason other than chance which explains why their results are so different but I highly doubt it. I am just profoundly shocked by how big a factor luck is over a seemingly large number of hands and I wonder how many hands it would take before I see their results begin to mirror each other. 10,000 hands? 100,000? A million? And if so, how much of my past slumping has been due to just long-term variations in luck like this? How can you minimize the effects even though you are seemingly doing nothing wrong or do you just have to accept that you are fated to lose for sometimes thousands of hands at a time?
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