Poker Analysis

Hopefully, this page will develop into an interesting analysis of poker playing. Much of the analysis will probably be mathematical, and some of it will be dependent on my sampled play on IRC.

I have split up my holdem bankroll into three different graphs so that each limit can be seen separately. The blue line corresponds to 50-100, the green to 10-20, and the red to 20-40. It is interesting to notice that I had been losing steadily at the 20-40 level for quite some time, but have pretty much been winning at the other levels.

IRC Holdem Bankroll

IRC 10-20 Hands

The graphs below show how much I've gained or lost on a per hand basis in the 10-20 IRC games. At some point, in the distant future, I'll use this information to adjust my actual play. But right now, my play is too erratic, and I don't have enough data to make any solid conclusions. I think once I get to about 200 data points per hand I'll have enough info to make some generalizations about my play.

note: this data includes short-handed and full table play. I am now collecting data from full table play (>=8 players). Once I have a few thousand hands of that I'll post it as well.

Short-Handed vs. Full table

The graph below illustrates the difference in playing patters of short-handed games vs. that of a full table. Notice that the center section has a less pronounced line at the origin, indicating that more hands were being played. In the graph, the cumulative winnings (in green) have been scaled by a factor of 1/10 so that both sets of data would fit on the same graph.

Also notice that when the game filled up - after about 480 hands - I started losing because I didn't adapt my style of play fast enough.

A look at rakes

We all know that the rake seriously affects our earnings. In the graph below the effect of the rakes is shown over 1500 hands of 20-40 holdem. While the unraked bankroll has almost made it back to the break even point, all of the raked bankrolls are at least 1,000 bux losers. The interesting thing to notice is that a 5% rake up to 2 small bets (a pretty draconian rake) is comparable to a 10% 1/2 small bet rake. I bring this up because where I play the rake is 10% up to $3, which is pretty close to 1/2 a small bet in the 5-10 game. Of course, as the rake increases both in percentage and cap, it just gets worse and worse for the player. Notice, this graph does not take into account how the rake affects play, only how it affects the size of the final pot.

My odds calculations

This is a crib sheet that I've been maintaining that contains much of the analysis that I've done for playing hold'em. Some of the analysis is rather tedious, some of it is incomplete, and some of it is probably wrong. I make it available for those who are interested.

Here's a link to my normal page