Poker Hiatus

This is gonna be a short post - I will be going on vacation from July 1-9 and will not be playing over that time. In fact, since I haven't played since clearing my Prima bonus last weekend, by the time I get back and into it again it will be over two weeks without playing a hand. Longest break since I started on this journey. At the very least I'll have a nice bonus / site to come back to - just today Paradise put out a 25% up to $100, 10x bonus with no expiry. Sweet.

And, just to get some math in, it occurs to me that I can use my PokerTracker database (which is now over 200K hands!) to answer a simple question - is there anyone out there losing at a rate that is greater than they could clear (say) a 10x bonus?

To take a concrete example, let's take the above Paradise bonus (10x, $100) and see what that works out to if you clear at $0.50/$1.00. The percentage of hands at that level which are raked according to my database is about 43.5%, so to get 1,000 raked hands, one would need to play about 2,300 dealt-hands. In order to lose money overall, they'd have to lose $100 in those 2,300 hands, which works out to -4.35 BB/100.

So, I did a filter in my database of all players at $0.50/$1.00 who have played at least 2,300 hands at that level. I have 46 players in this category. As it turns out, there is only ONE player out of those 46 that is losing at a rate greater than that. In fact, this person is losing at an amazing rate of -8.5 BB/100 over 3,000 hands. The next-worst player is losing at -3.46 BB/100, just to give you some perspective on how bad this guys' play is. No, neither of those players are me. And, no, I'm not going to tell you their screen names! :-)

The other 45 people are either winning or are losing slowly enough that the would come out of such a 10x bonus still cash-positive, which only reinforces my previous calculations about bonus chasing.

The corresponding numbers at $1/$2 are 1600 dealt-hands and -3.1 BB/100. I actually have 4 out of 42 players losing at that rate or greater over a 1,600+ hand stretch. I really don't know what to make of that as compared to the $0.50/$1.00 numbers, but just thought I'd throw it out there.