Special Bug Pages

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Do You Feel Lucky, Punk?

At my weekly poker lunch strategy meeting today, a friend brought in an interesting graph that he generated via the website www.pokerluckmeter.com. In a nutshell, the website allows you to download your pokertracker hand histories and then run a "luck" analysis on the data. I'm still digesting how, exactly, the site calculates this luck rating, but it has to do with calculating how far ahead or behind you are in every hand (i.e., equity) on each street and comparing the expected results to how the actual results turned out. The website runs through all your hands and then graphs the result of big blinds won vs. hands. It then somehow figures out where your results lie on the luck scale.

Now, my friend's graph was pretty amazing. It was a steadily increasing, upwardly-sloped graph. There were long periods of time when he ran extremely well and made much more money than the equity/EV calculations say he should have. The graph showed that my friend had experienced the top 10% possible of possible "good luck" with his hands. In other words, he had a very large number of hands accumulated where he was pretty far behind in the hand, but still managed to win. Said another way, he had more than his fair share of suck-outs, and imparted more than his fair share of bad beats on other players.

For fun, Mr. Multi and I downloaded our own data into the website and ran the analyses on our hand histories. Now, it's important to note that Mr. Multi has been complaining mightily of terrible beats for the past month or so. It seems like every day, MM comes in to work and tells me of some horrible beat he suffered the previous night. Kings cracked, Aces cracked, straights cracked, sets cracked, you name it. I chalked some of this up to just selective memory and, maybe, some bad play. Well, I was wrong; Mr. Multi has simply been running VERY bad. Per the pokerluckmeter analysis, MM has been in the bottom 3% of luck for the past 30K hands or so. In other words, his opponents have been sucking out left and right on him. He's playing good poker, but the variance of the game is crushing his results.

I had a good laugh at MM's bad luck, but then I ran the analysis on my own data. I selected the last month and a half of my NL data, which has felt subjectively like a pretty bad run of cards for me. Well, the website says that not only was it a bad run of cards, it was a horrible run of cards. No, make that a devastatingly, incredibly, awful, lousy, truly horrific run of cards. In the last 30K hands of NL cash I've played, I have experienced the "bottom 1% of worst possible luck" according to the website. Said another way, the poker gods have completely and utterly hated me for the past 45 days. Unlike my friend's nicely upward sloping graph with sustained periods of good luck, here's my results graph:


All I can say at this point is Holy Crap. As I told Mr. Multi, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. On the one hand, it says that I'm just running bad and I'm getting sucked out on left and right. On the other hand, it says I'm running bad and getting sucked out on left and right. Is this good news or bad? I really don't know. Per the website: "Because the Poker Luckmeter measures a form of luck that cannot be affected by any kind of strategic decisions, there is no scientific way to improve the results." In other words, fate says I was supposed to lose a lot of money in the past month and a half, and there ain't a damn thing I can do about it.

Holy Crap.

UPDATE: I was bugged by the results, above, so I went back and ran the website algorithm on a month's worth of data where I had made a steady, upward profit. Here's the result for a 30 day period in mid-August to mid-September of this year:
For this group of data, I still had prolonged periods of bad luck, but these were offset somewhat by periods of good luck. Overall, I was still "unlucky" but I managed to make money regardless, and I wasn't *always* getting sucked out on....

More cogitating required....
All-in for now...
-Bug

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