In poker it's called variance. You get good hands, you get bad hands. You get good hands that get unlucky. Over the short term (and by short time I refer to 20 thousand hands) this can mean that a good player loses out to a worse player.
However, play enough hands and your winrate will converge upon it's true value.
Quick example. In my last 10 sessions or so I'm about $20 up. But in those sessions I had one session up $40, one down $30, and various others both up and down. Over the period I won money at slighly over my true winrate. In NLHE winrate is generally measured in BB/100, where a BB is twice the big blind. Ie, if I'm playing 10nl, with blinds of $0.05 and $0.10 a winrate of 2BB/100 means that I win 40 cents for every hundred hands played.
A typical standard deviation for a tight player might be 35BB/100, so, do the maths on it. Plot a random work with +2 expected value and standard deviation 35 over 100k samples and see what results you get.
There are some players who manager to maintain a consistent winrate of 4-5BB/100 at 200nl, even 400nl (QQ-Quads-QQ comes to mind as an example). Those are the exception rather than the rule, but it happens over a large enough sample that it's not luck. They do this over far more than 100k hands. A guy going by the name of fatdan on the 2+2 forum has just won a prop bet where he bet, with 4-1 odds, that he could win 200 buy ins at 100nl in a month. Or, put another way, make $20k profit in one month. He did it, collecting not only the 200 buy ins, but around $70k in prop bet money. He maintained a winrate of around 2.5BB/100 over the 300k hand samples, and he was entirely confident that he could do it before making the bet (obviously, he chumped up $15-20k of his own to bet on himself). Before betting against him everyone knew that the winrate was possible, the question was, could he manager to put in the physical ammount of time required to win 200BI's. We're talking 8 hour days most days, playing 12 tables at a time. I'd have bet against him actually, but he did it, so meh.
Over a large enough hand sample poker could be better equated with driving a car. Equate driving safely with playing well, there is a chance that a good player can play well and still lose, in the same way that a good car driver can drive well and crash, but the majority will show a profit in poker just as the majority will reach their destination unscathed.
And I agree with tron, discussion derailed, sorry.
However, play enough hands and your winrate will converge upon it's true value.
Quick example. In my last 10 sessions or so I'm about $20 up. But in those sessions I had one session up $40, one down $30, and various others both up and down. Over the period I won money at slighly over my true winrate. In NLHE winrate is generally measured in BB/100, where a BB is twice the big blind. Ie, if I'm playing 10nl, with blinds of $0.05 and $0.10 a winrate of 2BB/100 means that I win 40 cents for every hundred hands played.
A typical standard deviation for a tight player might be 35BB/100, so, do the maths on it. Plot a random work with +2 expected value and standard deviation 35 over 100k samples and see what results you get.
There are some players who manager to maintain a consistent winrate of 4-5BB/100 at 200nl, even 400nl (QQ-Quads-QQ comes to mind as an example). Those are the exception rather than the rule, but it happens over a large enough sample that it's not luck. They do this over far more than 100k hands. A guy going by the name of fatdan on the 2+2 forum has just won a prop bet where he bet, with 4-1 odds, that he could win 200 buy ins at 100nl in a month. Or, put another way, make $20k profit in one month. He did it, collecting not only the 200 buy ins, but around $70k in prop bet money. He maintained a winrate of around 2.5BB/100 over the 300k hand samples, and he was entirely confident that he could do it before making the bet (obviously, he chumped up $15-20k of his own to bet on himself). Before betting against him everyone knew that the winrate was possible, the question was, could he manager to put in the physical ammount of time required to win 200BI's. We're talking 8 hour days most days, playing 12 tables at a time. I'd have bet against him actually, but he did it, so meh.
Over a large enough hand sample poker could be better equated with driving a car. Equate driving safely with playing well, there is a chance that a good player can play well and still lose, in the same way that a good car driver can drive well and crash, but the majority will show a profit in poker just as the majority will reach their destination unscathed.
And I agree with tron, discussion derailed, sorry.
