Sun's SnG Challenge

Poker is a lot like Minecraft™️, sometimes you have to make your own adventures!

So here’s the challenge… Win an Astral League SnG weekly “Best 20” leaderboard with a perfect score… 20 wins. This should be possible, but you will have to play quite a few tournies to pull it off.

Since there are league games in low, medium, and high stakes, everyone should be able to play along. Post it here if you manage to do it, and then we can keep trying to do the same with less games. Kinda like “Name That Tune,” but with poker.

Good luck and have fun!

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Well, how about if we go for 20 6th place finishes? I’m off to a good start :slight_smile:

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Yeah, I’m off to a great start too… 1 game, one 9th place!

Of course, i did that on purpose in order to radiate whatever it was that someone said I radiate. Pretty clever, huh?

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I was upwind so really couldn’t tell what you were radiating.

GL next one

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Here’s a list of the SnGs included in this challenge…

Astral - Pegasus, 100k
Astral - Ursa Major, 25k
Astral - Ursa Minor, 10k
Astral - Orion, 2.5k

I was downwind and he definitely was radiating…

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I’ve been trying…

TL;DR: I did it. 20 wins out of 61 Astral Pegasus 9-max games in a week for a perfect score on the “Best 20” leaderboard (Week 173). What’s my prize @SunPowerGuru ? :wink:

And here is the long version:

Background: A couple of months ago, I analyzed all of my SNG results. I found that I had won about 20% of my 9-max SNGs. The sample size was 427 games. The vast majority of those were high-stakes games, but the sample also included a good number of medium-stakes and very few low-stakes and elite-stakes games. Thus, over 100 games, I could expect to win 20 games, but with a standard deviation of 4, so it could well take 120+ games if I ran poorly – a daunting task.

On the plus side, there are two reasons why I believe that my current win rate might be closer to 25% though:

  1. I improved my game a bit in the last couple of months.
  2. The Astral Pegasus games have become significantly softer over the past year.

However, even with a win rate of 25%, the expected number of games necessary would still be 80, and it could take 100+ games if I ran badly.

With these considerations in mind, I decided to give it a serious try this week if the first 20 games yielded a significantly higher win rate than 25%. I didn’t quantify how many wins I wanted to have, but I was probably looking for at least eight wins in the first 20 games, so that the expected number of games to reach 20 wins would drop to 20 + 12/.25 = 68, which seemed more manageable.

Sunday (22 games, 9 wins, 2 second places): I started playing on Sunday, June 27. I got off to a good start winning my first two games, but then didn’t win any of the next seven games, so I was almost back down to a 20% win rate. Then I won Games 10 through 15 for an incredible six game win streak and also won Game 19. In total, I won 9 games out of my first 20 games – an insanely good start. So with an assumed win rate of 25%, the expected number of games necessary to reach 20 wins dropped to 20 + 11/.25 = 64.

Monday (30 games, 8 wins, 5 second places): Unsurprisingly, my win rate dropped on Monday. I played 30 games on Monday and won 8, which is actually very close to the estimated 25% win rate.

Tuesday (9 games, 3 wins, 1 second place): Overall, the final few games went well with 3 wins out of 9 games. There was a real chance to reach the goal in 58 games if I had won the game in which I went into the heads-up with a significant chips advantage but lost.

Playing style: For the most part, I was playing my usual game. I played slightly more speculative hands in the early game and also in the mid game if I hadn’t built a stack yet. I was also taking slightly more, reasonable all-in risks early on; this would put me in a good position to play for the win if I doubled up, and not much time was wasted if I busted out early. I obviously didn’t care about the bubble. I was also playing up to three games simultaneously to keep the time commitment manageable.

Statistics: Here is the distribution of finishing positions over all 61 games:

Position 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
# 20 8 6 7 5 4 3 3 5
% 33% 13% 10% 11% 8% 7% 5% 5% 8%

Odds and ends:

  • Longest streak without a win: 7 games (Games 3-9)

  • I am currently leading the Astral Pegasus “First 20” leaderboard with about 259k points, one of the highest scores ever (perhaps even the highest?) on this leaderboard.

  • I am currently leading the June 2021 monthly SNG high leaderboard with 714k points, the highest score ever on this leaderboard.

  • I paid 6,100,000 chips in buy-ins and won 11,628,000 in prizes for a profit of 5,528,000 chips and an ROI of 91%.

  • Never have I gotten so frustrated by second place finishes. Every heads-up battle that I lost meant that I had to play another 4-5 games (on average) to reach the goal.

  • No more SNGs for a while.

6 Likes

Well done. I think I’ve been as high as 70% ITM in my first 20 games at Astral Pegasus, but I don’t think I’ve made more than 4 or 5 wins. I didn’t want to play 80-100+ to try to win 20 in a week.

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First of all, congrats! I kinda thought you could pull it off if you set your mind to it. If I remember correctly, best I managed was 17 wins of 61 games?

Interesting to note that we had similar strategies, so both of our results were clumped around wins and early bust outs, with less mid position finishes.

LOL, yeah. You probably don’t remember, but you and I were in a SnG together when I was at the end of my try, and I told you I was burned out and going to take a long break. Playing more than 10 SnS a day for 3 or 4 weeks (in my case) will do that.

Anyway Spider, congrats. You were always the best in my book, now it’s official!

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how about we say we did but we didnt ?