by GeoC » Wed Jun 08, 2005 9:35 am
Thought I would use a couple of real world blackjack example to see if I can reach some of you. I’ve just been reinstated to a high stakes blackjack team where our ev is about $450/hr and our sd is $5500/hr.
Over the past 700 hours of play or around 100,000 hands played, our earnings are flat. We should be up over $300,000, but we’re not. Now we’re talking about a hand full of the best blackjack players on earth, so what’s going on?
Let’s go back a couple of years when the same team was losing $170,000 after about 1500 hours of play. (180,000 hands played). The team would recover and ultimately beak a bank. As of now the team is up almost 2 mil after 4 years or almost at expectation. It was like jumping through 1000 flaming hoops, but the math did kick in. Mathematicians call it regression to the mean.
How many of you are willing to continue playing poker if you hit a 50,000 hand downswing? Think it can’t happen? Think again, because if you play long enough, it will happen. So when I read things like won’t play that site anymore because I kept losing to bad beats or I’m on a 10K hand losing streak on that site, well it’s just wrong thinking.
The more poker you play the more you’ll test new swings both high and low.
-GeoC