Wednesday, September 28, 2005

How to measure progress?

I've created a lot of goals for myself over the last 9 months. A few I've met (mostly just bankroll); a fair number I've abandoned after further consideration (mostly live or online MTT related ones).

In terms of actually quantifying progress, I've really only been keeping my eye on a few metrics:
- online LHE, BB/100h: the sheer number of hands I play (not absolute compare to internet pros, but relative to other forms of poker I play) allows me to use this simple metric. For given playing limits, I am somewhat comfortable with gauging results after 25k hands. I know that many 2+2er's advocate a much larger sample set, and I probably would too if I played full time, but given my time bank I settle for 25k.
- live LHE, I make my best effort to determine and track the number of mistakes I make (measured in BB) per hour of table play. Things like missed value bets, incorrectly protecting my hand (e.g. if I incorrectly protected my hand on the turn in a 3 way pot giving another player with a 5:1 draw better odds to see the river, I would penalize myself 20% of the pot size on the turn even if I win the hand), paying off when certainly beaten, folding reasonable winning hand on river, etc... (The pace of live play is so slow that I can do substantial analysis of all interesting hands, whereas online I to put less work into reviewing individual hands. Typically, I only mentally review some online hands that occur towards the end of a session when I end up doing something very mindless, like driving somewhere, immediately after playing. I should invest a little more time in reviewing my online play.)
- online and live MTTs: ROI and avg hourly rate, my sample size is probably way too small

My current short term goal is related to online bankroll so this is easy to measure.

I guess my high level goal is something like this:
- To develop the capability and resources to have an expectation to earn $200/hour online and $100/hour live from poker

I am envious of those who have quickly and successfully made the climb to mid-high stakes level. My emphasis is on quickly. I do wonder about the duration and peak of this poker boom.

Some people, like Dr. Schonnmaker, are reminding players to be make the necessary plans to be successful regardless of how the environment changes.

2 comments:

d said...

Eric, Thanks for the reality check.

You are, as usual, correct. Numbers don't lie.

I should probably use 2.5BB/100 as the lower bound of my CI as a gating requirement for my BB/100 goals.

I suppose that SD is going to be much higher in 6 max games, but I still prefer these since they require more decision making.

d said...

I previously marched up to the $15/$30 online level (and I'll be honest to admit, in some cases without even the aforementioned 25k set size), and then subsequently cashed out the lion share of my online bankroll to use as a seperate live bankroll for $20/$40.

As I reclimb the online LHE levels using statistically accurate confidence intervals, it will be a kick in the gut if it turns out I can't even claim to be a winning $3/$6 player!