Something Semi-Interesing-ish

I don’t care if you or anyone agrees with me, in this thread or ever, on any topic.

Anyway, it would be nice to be able to separate it out if you play both ring and tournies. i don’t, and you can’t. So, within it’s limitations, which I freely admit, i still think it’s a semi-interesting-ish way to track how you’re doing.

And you are very likely to get my sarcasm even if you do agree with me!

From my Bank history:

RG Play: Chips put in: 3625000 Chips came out: 4074134 Net: 449134

I have no way to figure out how many hands of RG I’ve played, but it’s obviously capped at the total number of hands that I’ve played, which is 28650. But I’d guesstimate that I’ve probably played about 75% Tournament, and 25% Ring, if that. So if that’s accurate, then I’ve won 449134 chips with around 7162.5 hands, which amounts to just 62.7 chips/hand.

I tried running numbers for tournaments, but something’s screwy with the data and I don’t trust what I’m seeing. It’s too late for me to try to figure out what the problem is, so I’ll have to leave it for now.

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Well, you could note your bank and hands played now, then just play ring or tounies for a week and get useful data.

You can then see how your bank moved in the time period and how many hands you played, and get a number. One could do this every week or every day, or each session, or whatever, and it would generate useful data.

But if you do that, it would go from semi-interesting-ish to just interesting.

You could play 50 hands in a tournament, and you could have won 49 of them, and only lost 1 which knocked you out of the tournament. So you would have played 50 hands, won 49, lost only 1, and yet not won a single chip for your effort.

Whilst every hand played and won in a ring game affects your bank, hands won in a tournament don’t necessarily do.

In fact, the number of hands won in a tourney could harm your calculations, because it will increase the number of hands you won, without having any increase on your bank. So you’re still dividing the same number of chips you won by a much larger number of hands won.

The data you get from chips won/ hands won in tournaments is therefore useless in determining how your game is improving. I don’t know how to say it clearer. It’s ok if you still finding semi-interesting-ish, but it really isn’t helpful AT ALL for tournament players.

Probably counting how many hands you win in a tourney vs how many hands you lose could be indicative of skill somehow, but there are many tournaments where you win many many hands and don’t end up in the top 3 or 4 paid places, which means you win 0 chips for all your efforts, but that doesn’t indicate how well or bad you played AT ALL.

Sorry I keep disagreeing, but that’s only because I disagree :nerd_face:

I tend to agree with @Maya in that this has its limits for how useful it is due to the way tournaments work. But I also think it’s interesting to run the numbers anyway. It’s sort of like a batting average or a QB rating. Maybe it doesn’t tell you the whole story, but, understanding the limitations, if you perform the math the same way you end up with a number that you can use to compare two different players and get some sense of how they compare in this specific equation.

For better tournament analysis, you can take the number of tournaments entered, divided into the amount of real chips won less the number of real chips spent on the buy-in, and not worry about the number of hands played or the number of intra-tournament chips won.

Figured I’d put together a little info for the group…

Using @SunPowerGuru’s calculation I’m at about 340.

However, I actually went through and created a fairly good estimate of RG hands I’ve played. This number being a total including all the rags I mucked pre-flop, I’ve come up with around 100 chips per RG hand.

(This was somewhat painful, but not the worst thing I’ve had to do. 3/10 do not recommend.)

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Thanks Fozman. Very semi-interesting-ish.

Just for the record, I never suggested this was useful in any way, shape, or form, at least not as originally posted. I clearly said that I came up with a number, but had no idea what it meant, or if it meant anything. If someone has a tool, but has no idea what it’s for, it can hardly be useful.

I think it’s mildly interesting that the one side of the moon always faces Earth. I don’t think this fact is useful.

I think playing poker on Replay is interesting, but it’s not exactly useful to me. There are a great many things I find interesting that have no real use at all. So what?

If I say, “I think scrambled eggs are interesting,” and someone comes back with, “bacon isn’t very useful,” yes, it’s mildly irritating. I apologize for letting myself be dragged into a meaningless and childish argument over something that had absolutely nothing to do with my post.

Granted, this information, as presented, isn’t useful. I never said it was, so won’t bother debating the issue further.

Lacking access to hand histories, it would be nice to have a fast, simple metric by which to gauge one’s progress. I think this general idea could easily be adapted, perhaps on a month by month basis, to provide that metric to those who focus on one form of poker or another (ring or tournaments)

How many chips did I actually win last month? How many hands did I actually play? Fast, simple, easy to do, and at least semi-useful-ish.

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Thank you for calling our discussion childish and meaningless. I just wanted to point out that it had everything to do with your post, and you just didn’t like it. Not sure why you want to belittle it, but ok.

Regarding your last post:

and

Not going to debate it any further, but just look at what you said just before that:

and

So you did say it was useful in some way, shape and form, and that’s what triggered the debate. Now you’re denying it for some reason, but that’s ok too.

Anyway, no need to continue discussing something you think is childish and meaningless. But just as you disagree with posters on some of their ideas, you should be prepared for others to disagree with you on some of your ideas, and there’s nothing wrong, childish, or meaningless about that.

The “hands folded” includes hands that were initially played but don’t remain in play to the showdown. I suspect that could skew the calculation by enough to matter.

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Oh, I didn’t realize that. If you are sure about that, yes, it would skew the results. I should use the “flops seen” number instead?

I think that, as long as one is consistent in how they get their number of chips per hand, it would yeild a numbet that is at least quasi-useful-ish. I’m looking for a simple way to gauge my game month after month. If I see a big swing one way or the other, I can dig deeper to try to figure out why it changed.

You guys need to see a couples therapist, seriously!

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I wouldn’t bet my life on it, but that’s what it looks like. So, yes, “Flops Seen” is likely a more consistent number. At a minimum, we know what it includes.

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Still not perfect, of course. Ideally, we would include hands where we bet, but everyone folds. I guess we have to work with what we have though. For the use I have in mind, it probably doesn’t make much difference.

Thanks for the constructive input!

IMO, for tournament players who would like to track their progress using an easy and already available method, tournament points are the best way to do it.

Tourney points are calculated while taking into consideration the buy-in, the position one finishes in and the number of players in that tourney. All these factors are important in determining how well one does in a tournament, and they’re already available.

All one needs to do is to see how many points they are accumulating each month, and compare it with the previous month to track their progress.

For those who are crazy about averages, you could always divide the total number of points by the total number of tourneys played in a specific week or month, and you will get the average number of points you are making per tourney. That could be a useful tool to compare and track.

Chips won in tournaments are prizes, and hands played in tournaments don’t generate anything towards the bank, so it’s irrelevant to create complicated ways to relate them, regardless of how interesting they are.

P.S. This message is for serious grown-ups who don’t mind discussing different ideas and solutions on the forums, and are serious about tracking their progress in methods that actually work, like @puggywug and @Fozman Not for the haters who only weigh in to insult people they don’t like, without any relevance to the topic itself :wink:

Tournament points are good for tracking your own progress. And you can track the leaderboards in the weekly promotions, which is very handy.

I don’t think anyone’s brought it up, but my main problem with the Toplists page is that they’re dominated by players who have an ungodly number of chips, and have played for ages. I wish the leaderboard page had some time-limited boards as well, to let us get a sense of who’s hot this week/month/year.

They’re less useful for gauging any two random players. A player who has a long history will have had more time to accumulate points than a new player, etc. Or a player who just doesn’t play a lot of tournaments won’t have as many relative to a player who exclusively plays them. Etc.

Plus, I’m not sure that there’s a convenient way to see another player’s tournament points. I guess there’s not a convenient way to get the other information that SPG uses for his calculations, either, though.

I do think the site would do well to implement some new system for establishing player ratings, beyond tournament points, the leaderboards, and the bankroll.

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That’s true! But you don’t need to be on any leaderboard to track your own progress using tournament points.
You could just make note of points earned in every tourney you play, like on an Excel sheet, and track your own progress without necessarily having played enough to be on any leaderboard.

You’re right, those boards are mostly topped by those who play a lot, and there’s no way to see another player’s points if they’re not on the board, but for self evaluation and tracking own progress, tourney points vs number of tourneys played could still be a useful tool that doesn’t require massive or complicated calculations.

It’s still only for tourneys though. But Replay is introducing Ring Game Points as well, which could be equally useful, and could save everyone from having to go back to their banks and hands and create their own methods.

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I’m only interested in tracking my own progress. Tournament points are sensitive to the number of tournies played, profit or loss per hand isn’t.

The MTT monthly boards will only count a specific number of tournies. The SnG monthly boards will show averages over all SnGs played in that bracket, but it’s still hard to translate tournament points into meaningful data. One could show a gain in average tournament points and still not know if they are winning or losing.

Dividing chips won by number of hands played is simple, requires minimal record keeping, and provides a meaningful metric.

It’s not dividing them that’s the problem, it’s getting those accurate numbers.

To get the total chips won, you need to go through your history, and take out all the freebies and rewards etc…

Still incomplete and inaccurate.

To get the total of hands played, you either have to get the number of flops seen, which is inaccurate because it doesn’t include the number of hands you won by making everyone fold, or get the number of hands played which also doesn’t include all the hands that have seen the flop.

So far, there’s nothing simple about this or that requires minimal record keeping.

Now to go back to repeating myself and stating the obvious facts which unfortunately keep being ignored for some reason, in tournaments, chips won are not won per hand, they are rewards for making the top paid places. They are called TOP PRIZES for a reason. They are just prizes. They are completely irrelevant to the number of hands played.

Dividing chips won in a tournament by the number of hands played in a tournament to track progress is absurd. The number obtained is as relevant to our progress as dividing any 2 numbers that bear no relevance to each other and using the result.

If I play 1 tourney this month where I have played 60 hands and didn’t make it to the top paid prizes, that gives me 0 chips won per hand, even if I have won 40 of these 60 hands, still no chips in the bank.

If next month I play 1 tourney and I win first prize of 1M chips in just 4 hands, that should mean that I made 250k chips per hand.

What a great way to measure my progress!!! from 0 chips per hand to 250k per hand.

Again, the chips won in a tournament are NOT won per hand. They are prizes. They cannot be divided by the number of hands played. It’s totally absurd and irrelevant.

But hey, what do I know? Let’s keep pretending these aren’t the facts, and keep insisting that the number is in any way relevant.

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Having been gainfully employed for several years tasked with dissecting and manipulating mountains of data into meaningful results used to drive strategic decisions, I guess I could be considered a “professional” in such affairs. I’ll share some of my thought process with you here.

Clearly, it’s obvious the metric discussed so far in this thread is only going to be useful for Ring Games. As such, we need to focus on the chips earned only in ring games and some statistic to divide by. Fortunately, I’ve started the work on that already earlier in the thread.

Something else to consider: the stake levels one plays at are going to heavily skew a raw chips earned metric. We would need to make this figure “dimensionless”, if you will, by exchanging this for something used across all ring games: the Big Blind.

At this point, we are dabbling near the BB won & Ring Game Points metrics that have been used on Leaderboards. We want to arrive at BB won per played hand.

This section is mostly moot because of the following paragraph... click to expand.

So, we must decide what to divide by:

  • Total Hands – moderately meaningful and all-inclusive
  • Non-Folded aka “Played” Hands – not a very accurate estimate of actual played hands because many folded hands are also “played” and have a chip cost associated with them, however if one could derive an accurate count of hands in which one is involved this would be the best metric
  • Flops Seen – is a relatively good estimate on “pay to play” hands, but has some degree of inaccuracy because of what can happen pre-flop, despite this it could be a pretty good metric
  • Pots Won – does not take into account the majority of hands played, however it still could be a marginally meaningful metric

Let’s also look at some logical definitions:

  • Folded hands are always losing hands and sometimes change the chip count.
  • Pots won are always non-folded hands and always change the chip count.
  • Non-folded hands contain both winning hands and losing hands and always result in a change of chip count.
  • Flopped hands contain winning hands and losing hands and always result in a change of chip count.

If we consider any hand that changes the chip count to be a “played” hand, the problem we run into is that some of these hands are “stuck” in the folded hands statistic. Besides that, we cannot use the statistics page because it also includes tournament hands. Trying to generate an exact count is impossible from the statistics page. We could try using another derived statistic or try to create a ratio of winning hands vs. losing hands to multiply by, but these aren’t as meaningful.

Enter the short term. We can get an accurate count of “played” hands in our recent ring game activity page; simply discard any hand with zero net chips. We can also get an accurate count of chips won and thus calculate BB won. It’s relatively easy to do manually on a single session or a few short ones. (Automating it is incredibly difficult due to formatting, but I already have a way to extract all the values and suits of the cards… so probably not a huge leap.)

Here’s an example of a short term calculation:

Other than a slight distortion from folded blinds, this seems like the most accurate way to gauge ring game effectiveness. Aggregate enough of these sessions and you will have a long-term progress report that you can plot out over time or even see the tables at which you are most effective.

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First of all Fozman, thanks! Both of your posts took a lot of time and effort, and I, for one, appreciate it.

After thinking about it more, I am going to just use “total hands” and be done with it. I don’t have the desire to spend much time on this, or to do any more work than I absolutely have to. All I want is a down and dirty metric that I can track over time to see how my adjustments are panning out. (or not) As long as it’s fast, easy, and delivers a consistent result, it will meet my needs.

I tend to specialize. Right now, my focus is on 25K 9 seat SnGs. Since that’s all i have been playing the last few weeks, a lot of the hard stuff is automatically eliminated.

This is neither clear, nor obvious to me. Total chips won divided by total hands played meets my needs nicely. Would you care to elaborate on why you think this is a bad approach?