Miscellaneous Ramblings

There are some things that come into my head over the course of a session, week, month, year that are worth talking about, but not really worthy of their own article. This is basically a dumping ground for all of those things I’ve thought of but can’t put into a coherent, useful article on their own.

On occasion, people tell me that they like my articles and I will sometimes ask them if there is anything that they would like to see me write about. Someone whose play I respect asked me to write an article about the long run in poker and what it takes to see it through. The truth is the long run is pretty easily calculable. The bigger the sample size you have, the more accurately you can estimate your win rate and other relevant statistics. After doing some research on Google to find the longest break-even stretches, there are some extraordinary examples from winning players of 150-thousand-to-300-thousand hand break-even stretches online. Now, online games are definitely tougher and, as such, have much higher variance and longer break-even stretches. Also, most games online are played six-max and that game has a much higher variance. Finally, these were almost exclusively no-limit players who tend to have higher variance as well.

All this is to say that, really, it depends. However, let’s make some educated guesses. In the game that this person plays in regularly (nine-handed limit hold‘em), the average standard deviation that I could find for winning players online is around 14 bb/100. Let’s say this person wins about $40/hr. in a $20-$40 game. At 35 hands an hour, that’s roughly $114/100 hands so, 5.7 bb/100 hands. Plugging all of this into an expected value/variance calculator and running 10,000 simulations, we find that over one year of this playing full time (2000 hours at 35 hands/hour or 70,000 hands) our player will win somewhere between 2,500 and 5,000 small bets, have a downswing of about 223 big bets and a longest break-even stretch of 9,400 hands. That’s 268 hours or 6.7 weeks. So, in a pretty low variance game with a decent win rate, it’s possible to break even for 1.5 months or longer.

I have been playing live poker for quite a while now and for the most part, the dealers and staff at the casinos I play at are pretty good. I’m obviously not talking about the World Series of Poker because it’s unfair to judge those dealers as so many of them are extremely green and really have almost no idea what they are doing. The dealers that struggle, I think, can improve greatly with just a few small fixes. First, pay attention. Most mistakes I see made are because the dealer is watching TV or engaged in a conversation while doing their job. If you were a computer programmer, do you think you could code effectively while having a conversation or watching TV? I doubt it.

Second, admit your mistakes. During a stud-eight-or-better tournament this year at the WSOP, we had a dealer that made several mistakes over the course of a few hands and each time, he was aggressively insisting that he knew what he was doing and we were just being crazy or whatever. It’s OK to make mistakes and if you get defensive about them or get flustered about what is going on around you, it’s just going to make things worse for you. Mistakes happen and even the two best dealers I know, Aristan and Patrick (incidentally they are brothers), have them on occasion. They recognize when they have made a mistake, own up to it, and move on. I know that dealing poker can be a high stress job (I did it for about a year and a half) but, like in all jobs, mistakes happen and the people that excel the most are those that learn from them and continue to get better.

Finally, and this isn’t really a way to get better, it’s just a way to annoy your players (read customers) less, please stop injecting your opinions into the game. We don’t need to know what hand you put that player on or about the bad beat you took yesterday or what you think of someone at the table’s play. In fact, all of those things are mentioned in poor taste and should be avoided at all costs.

The last topic I want to touch on (until further notice where it may become a full article) is the legalization and regulation of online poker at a state and federal level. I would just like to encourage everyone reading this to become more informed and more involved where you can and be sure to get in touch with your congressman to let them know how you feel about this issue. In addition, let’s try to not settle for the first thing that comes along federally, thinking that any regulation is better than no regulation. We have to be sure to get what we need out of the deal, even if we can’t get what we want. ♠

Gavin Griffin was the first poker player to capture a World Series of Poker, European Poker Tour and World Poker Tour title and has amassed nearly $5 million in lifetime tournament winnings. Griffin is sponsored by HeroPoker.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NHGG