The Upswings and Downswings of Poker

[@mynameiskarl]

BET BIG, increase that variance and get your big bets merch here: www.etsy.com/shop/mynameiskarlstore!

[@Rebbyrag]

It being mentally rough is ALSO in your favor because it can keep skilled players out of your game. There are winning players that quit because they can’t deal with losses. Your edge can be in ability to deal with loss.

[@persistentlydriven9390]

Nice

[@emdiar6588]

The bit towards the end about concentrating and not being distracted by face book etc. is spot on. When ever my GF phones me in the middle of an online MTT, I seem to bust out within 3 hands EVERY TIME!!! Often I have a really strong hand and jam, because I'm on auto pilot and too busy chatting to see that my AKs is up against 4 tight pre flop callers. It's got to the point where I dread hearing my phone. I have to put my phone on silent when I'm deep or if the rebuy period is over.

[@persistentlydriven9390]

🗣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 same !!!

[@curtschannen2782]

Thank you for the video. It has helped me realize we all go through the same doubts and insecurities in our game.

[@adamporter1559]

Well done Fried, keeping it real for the poker peoples of KZbin. Pretty relevant topic for me as I am on the biggest downswing I've had since before Black Friday, and have lost a bit of confidence (its just variance [Fingers crossed]). Hope you feel like making more vids sooner rather than later because I need them ;)

[@4EverrMusicc]

LOL the last clip at the end The illustrations and using pokerdope helped me personally understand your message alot better, great vid!

[@0ptimal]

Excellent video. Fundamental information. I've known about variance and whatnot but I didn't realize the extent of it. You don't know how good you really are for a long time, and just because you've struggled initially doesn't mean you suck, and vice versa.

[@AndreasFroehliPoker]

Great video, a lot of people still haven't used pokerdope.com up to this day

[@marksimpson2321]

Hi Fried, It's great to come across more up-to-date information delivered calmly from a current winning online cash pro. The Small Stakes NLHE book made a very similar point ten years ago but I hear very very very few players discussing how variance will give even good players long periods of break even or worse results. If you have win rates of less than 2bb/100 buckle up. Keep the content coming. Please! Mark ☺

[@beyondethics]

This video is not going to get the attention it deserves. I'm an aggressive player and I have huge swings. I can now see that I used to call upon variance as an excuse and now I'm analyzing myself more honestly. This is the one thing you need to get better at poker. I am now a 1BB winner over 200k hands at 100NL zoom on pokerstars btw, so I probably still don't know if I'm a winning player (excluding rakeback). I'm a 15BB winner at 2-4 live poker over 50hrs of play (no idea of how many hands that was, but I'm sure I must have ran crazy good, even though it didn't feel that way in the moment). I still have a lot to learn, and this video was another step in the right direction. Thank you for a great and informative video, Fried!

[@mynameiskarl]

Totally agree that this video won't get the attention it "deserves", but I'm glad you did see it and got something out of it!

[@bdanRO]

Loved everything about this video!

[@jonathancg2161]

Curious to know, are these videos made so you can promote upswing poker in the future or are these from you personnally? Nice video btw. You are really good at explaining complicated things in simple words. Keep doing what you do :)

[@mynameiskarl]

Thanks! This channel is a personal side project. There's no goal right now, I'll just see where it takes me. But I can still use it to promote Upswing when I feel like it ;)

[@bertoldopleari7779]

Great video! Super smart super bright, like you are Fried. Great respect for you and your game. Still my fav video of yours is the first one! :)

[@coolbeans8682]

How much do you deviate from the "GTO" strategy in order to exploit fun players? I understand that this is a hard question to answer in a general way. Do you open wider against people who tend to over-fold? Do you change your sizing when there is a call-happy, recreational player in the big blind? Or don't you make many adjustments at all and stick to your default strategy? Is the price of not adjusting negligible? I guess that my main question is: too which degree do you change your strategy when facing unbalanced opponents?

[@mynameiskarl]

I don't make too many preflop adjustments like that. I used to open way wider vs overfolders than I do now. I slowed down a bit because I realized the sample I have on them in my HUD might not be big enough to make extreme adjustments. I don't open bigger vs weaker players. Only 3bet bigger vs some of the worst call happy dudes. Probably missing some EV that way, impossible to quantify. I play zoom, so I get a big benefit from just being able to autopilot preflop. I do most of the exploiting postflop. I'm pretty shameless regarding exploitative bet sizes there vs weak players.

[@ashj22ful]

Really good video, can you do one of these for tournament poker ?

[@mynameiskarl]

Thanks for the compliment! Unfortunately, I have never been into tournaments, and I will just stick to what I know (6max cash games).

[@SLowPLaYaH]

Imagine how many excellent poker players have thought that they sucked over the years because they didn't realize that losing after 100,000 hands was even possible for a winning player. Some LLinusLLove Jr. is out there at your local McDonald's taking your order because he crushed online poker for 50,000 hands but was on the wrong end of variance and thus concluded that he was obviously no good at poker.

[@seancarter759]

You the man more frequent uploads plzzzz! ❤️

[@haypapa]

can u explain in simple terms what standard dviation would mean here for poker. what does it represent

[@mynameiskarl]

In simple terms: "The Standard Deviation is a measure of how spread out numbers are." The bigger the standard deviation of the game you play, the more likely it is you run far above or below the expected winnings defined by your actual winrate. In a game like PLO you'll more often get your stack in as a (semi)coinflip, or a 60/40, or a check/jam with 33% equity... This leads to more variance / higher standard deviation than for example NLHE. You'll encounter bigger up & downswings in PLO than you would in NLHE with the same winrate because the standard deviation is higher ------------------------ A bit more in depth: My statistics knowledge isn't fantastic, but I think it goes as follows: Say a player's winrate is 3bb/100. This translates to 3000 bb after 100k hands. "Winnings after 100k hands" is the variable we want to observe. But not every 100k hands that player plays will lead to exactly 3000bb. It can be more, it can be less... but if you play an infinite sample of hands, we expect it to average out to 3000bb / 100k hands or 3bb/100. The standard deviation is a measure of how often & how far one observation will be from the mean. You can find an estimate for standard deviation per 100 hands in Holdem Manager or use some of the estimates provided by www.primedope.com/poker-variance-calculator/. For 6max NLHE, in my own experience it's about 95bb/100 hands. Let's use 100bb/100 hands to make it simple. The Poker Variance calculator (again: www.primedope.com/poker-variance-calculator/) translates this to a standard deviation after 100k hands of 3162bb. For a variable that follows a normal distribution / bell curve: 68.2% of all observations are within one standard deviation of the mean (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation#/media/File:Standard_deviation_diagram.svg) This means that for a 100k hands played with a winrate of 3bb/100 & standard deviation of 100bb/100: 68.2% of the time the observed winnings will be between [-162 bb, 6162 bb] (or winrate of :-0.16 bb/100, 6.16 bb/100) The mean minus 1 standard deviation: 3000bb - 3162bb = -162bb The mean plus 1 standard deviation: 3000bb + 3162bb = 6162bb This is your "70% confidence interval" (or 68.2% to be correct) I hope that clears things up a bit. It's been a while since I had statistics classes in college, so the exact details are a bit fuzzy.

[@pokertang]

Bedankt voor je videos Fried. Ik ontdek sinds enkele dagen je channel, super interresant. Een vraagje betreffende variance. Denk je dat de cashout optie van pokerstars, de downswings volledig kan vernietigen ? Ik ben een lowstake (25 NL 9h) winnende speler en draai sinds mijn overstap aan 10bb/100 (running good).

[@mynameiskarl]

Hallo! Ik heb je vraag als inspiratie gebruikt voor een nieuwe video: kzbin.info/www/bejne/jGO9ZqR5hM-MoLs

[@pokertang]

@@mynameiskarl topper 👍👍

[@lingvohacker]

background song title plz? p.s.: nice vid

[@mynameiskarl]

It's part of the youtube free music library: kzbin.infomusic Unrest - ELPHNT

[@paullampl1]

great content mate

[@nathansmith7335]

How does this information apply to a part-time live only cash game player? It’s almost impossible to get enough hands in to know if you are winning/loosing over the long term vs variance.

[@mynameiskarl]

Welcome to live poker I guess :( The winrates should be higher and the variance should be lower, so you shouldn't endure break even stretches as long as you could encounter online. Afaik.

[@samuelrodgers8946]

All samples, not matter how big, are subject to flaws. So you always need to be careful when looking at any sample size and take it with a grain of salt. But in general, most live poker players would say that 500 hours is a decent enough size to get an idea.

[@paullampl1]

i've been playing poker for 4 years somewhat seriously, and hearing that a 2bb winrate can only deliver profit 75% of the time over 100k is pretty shocking. This is why live poker is a joke, that means that unless you are playing in incredibly soft games all of the time and have some crazy winrate, the likelihood of you loosing over the course of 6 months or even a year is pretty high. That level of frustration is just too much to deal with in my opinion.

[@jamesevans2507]

but it IS that soft lolz, it's live poker.

[@samuelrodgers8946]

Yeah. Live poker will have a very different win rate. Pros beating live poker games usually have win rates of 5-10 BB per hour. That translates to 15-30 BB per 100 hands. If you plug those numbers in, the chance of a loss after 100k hands is very small.

[@DerekMatthewCoverSongs]

The titanic clip made me laugh !

[@DarkiPoker]

Awesome video

[@Rejtysan]

I enjoyed. Well played

[@iscoalacaron4276]

Thank you - Very nice ♥️

[@jacobolson8417]

Awesome video man, looks like I will be avoiding the 2.5/5 games if the best I can get is 25% chance of loss after 100K hands, how many BB/100 of rake do you pay at this stake? One month of learning PLO and I bet you could beat 2.5/5 zoom for a higher hourly with less long term variance (more short term maybe) and your winrate ceiling would be so much higher. Not recommending PLO as an alternative, just seems so tedious to be such an incredible player yet grind so hard for your bread and taking so much variance. I would imagine you could easily get into some $25/$50 live games, play your regular style and absolutely crush, and you could focus on one table getting all kinds of reads to make your exploits and boost your winrate. With the same amount of time invested you could likely be a multi-millionaire from live poker in a couple years from now. Perhaps you just have a great deal with Upswing, which would make sense. I would love to be an upswing coach some day lol keep the videos coming! all of us from wannabes to pros really enjoy them

[@mynameiskarl]

Hey, thanks for the elaborate comment (and comments on other videos) bb/100 rake I pay, is not something I personally think about. Of course more rake is bad, that's easy. But all I do is focus on my bottom line, post rake. I don't care if I win at 5bb/100, but pay 20bb/100 in rake in a soft environment, or win at 5bb/100 but pay 2bb in rake in a tough environment. Rakeback is always been a nice extra & I'm sad that it's basically gone at PS, but it is what it is. I have studied & played PLO for 1-2 months at some point in 2014. Even had coaching. After running breakeven for 100k hands (which is pretty good I guess), I started missing NL. Higher winrates might be possible in PLO, but the standard deviation will be higher. So I think that in general, swings should be bigger. Nowadays, I feel like I'm don't really want to learn a new game anymore. At least not one where the competition has been playing & crushing it for years (so learning 6+ hold'em might be an exception). But PLO, tournaments, live poker... I'm sure I could adjust and beat it at some point, I just don't want to go through the process.

[@jacobolson8417]

@@mynameiskarl thanks for the reply my dude, this all makes a lot of sense to me, it is often underrated how difficult and painstaking it can be to switch to a completely different form of poker. I tried PLO too for a while this summer, the variance is so much that you would need like 3-4 times the bankroll as for holdem in my opinion. 6+ holdem does not seem easy to learn since there is not much software, but it may be a good idea if we start seeing more and more games of it popping up everywhere. Seems to me like you are very well established online, and if need be I am sure you would not have such a difficult time transitioning to live cash games (once the bots take over online). The only thing which confused me: I always heard that more rake is better... all of a sudden you are telling me the opposite is true? XD

[@PatrickA1]

I play with the maniac last night if he got to the river there was a 90% chance that he would jam All in. I took him out in two hands

[@fab29fs]

Hey man, how does this apply to live poker? For instance, a very good 3/5 NL live pro makes about 10bb/hour and since there are about 25-30 hands played in 9-handed live games, this translates to roughly 30-40bb/100. However, if we assume they play about 1500 hours a year, this is only 35-45k hands. Do these numbers sound about right to calculate the expected variance for a good 3/5 NL live pro?

[@fab29fs]

I specifically ask this because I’m currently transitioning from being a part-time winning player in small and mid stakes online to being a full-time poker pro. What do you think are good bankrolls to be playing live 3/5 and 5/10 NL games?

[@jacobolson8417]

@@fab29fs you need at least 30 buyins for whatever stake if you can win 10bb/hour, you can do it with less buyins but if you do that for long enough you will end up going through some hell for sure, preserve your mental health and go 30+ and probably 40+ for 5/10 unless you have some really soft games where you can win at least 10bb/hour

[@jacobolson8417]

to address your other question, I put 30bb/100 into the variance calculator and 30,000 hand sample. Apparently chance of losing in this scenario is precisely 0.0000%, so if you really do crush like that (which I do not doubt), you got nothing to worry about in the long run.

[@jacobolson8417]

additionally our chance of losing over one month (2500 hands) is 6.68%. So you really just need to approx. dodge a backdoor flush draw+ backdoor straight draw when some donk stacks off 76hh on 5hAcKs against your 55. and if he hits the miracle cards, you get to try again next month.

[@beyondethics]

Great to see you here as well. Keep on learning, Fabian! Gl at the tables.

[@antigtohighlights1079]

I was 7bb over 100k hands now I'm B/E over 70k hands, wtf lol

[@elastronaute1198]

that doesn't even make sense how could your hands have decreased?

[@mantassbakas]

Great video !

[@DraftDynasty1]

I think you made a mistake here with the standard deviation you put big blinds / 100 instead of Big Bets per 100. Variance can be pretty crazy I once had a 300k breakeven strech at NL100 fr on stars back in the days. I was 100bi below ev. (was winning at 3BB/100 over a 1 millions hands sample before that breakeven). But in the end I think it all even's out. Last year I had a crazy heater on zoom 100nl winning 100bi in 100k hands

[@mynameiskarl]

I have input both winrate & standard dev as bb/100 in the tool, so it evens out. Might be confusing, so yeah, I could maybe have been more clear about that.

[@nikita2560]

Would be cool if you looked at your actual stats, but still very useful

[@jingweizheng4053]

Always remember one thing guys. There are downswings and there are just you being a shit player. Make sure you distinguish those and be honest yourself.

[@giakoumatosxd]

After your experience, are 40 buyings a good bankroll for nl 200 zoom and nl500 zoom? Or it is small ..

[@guyredares]

lose that annoying music man