Being a beginner sucks.

I've just ticked over 50K hands in my PokerTracker database, so I've had a fair amount of experience at being a noob. But does it get any easier? Nope.

Am I a good player? Am I even a winning player? Can you tell after 50,000 hands? Well, not really.

I can tell you that I have an overall winrate of 6.77 ptbb/100. Most people would tell you that's a good rate.

What's the dollar amount? -$346.

So I'm a "winning" player, I just lost a lot of money.


If you haven't already guessed how those two figures fit together: I won money at lower levels over a lot of hands and then lost it quickly at higher levels.
So I have 12K hands at $5NL winning at 28ptbb/100, or 11k at $25NL winning at 0.59 ptbb/100.
Add in another slightly up 4k at $10NL and you see that for over half my hands I've got between a great and an "at-least it's positive' situation.

So where'd the money go. Well, I lost almost $200 at $50NL over just 3k hands, I lost $150 at $2/4 LHE 6-max over just 500 hands.

What do these stats tell me about my play?
Very, very little.

The $5NL stats are fairly solid. I could play another 20k hands with that starting point and I'd have to do very badly to end up with a bad stat. That's a solid base.

11k hands at $25NL just doesn't give enough info.
The BB at that level is $0.50 so getting stacked is a standard -50BB loss. With 10k hands you have 100 * 100 so that equates to a 0.5ptBB/100. So I get stacked next time I'm at the table I go down to dead even.
Get stacked twice suddenly I'm -0.5.

10K is not a lot of hands at NL. 4 buy-ins can go in a session without ever making a wrong call and that will swing you a couple of BB/100 straight away.

So it sucks that I can't tell whether my 4-buy-in loss at $50NL or my 40BB loss at $2/4 SH was due to variance or a major weakness in my play (likely both). My BR can handle these losses at this level, I just have to develop into a player who can too. Part of that will be knowing that it *will* get better, that it's variance and not a chronic leak or three somewhere.

What I'm saying I suppose, is I feel there's no use trying to look at your winrate/record over x-thousand hands and deciding whether to move up or not, or whether you're doing okay at that level.

People are always making poker sound easy "dise is so easy..." or "Party Poker's $25NL is so soft..." or "just play TAG and you'll make loads on this site" and especially with regard to moving up "$10NL is the same as $5NL", "the play at $50NL is the same as $25NL".

The thing is it won't be the same. It may be entirely psychological, but a lot of people struggle at some point with these "easy" transitions.

For me moving up is a question of BR and confidence. Moving up with one without the other is a recipe for disaster, and confidence can't come from the fact that I had 4ptbb/100 over 7k hands at the last level. It has to be confidence with how I'm facing the questions the game is throwing at me.

One thing I would like to stress to my fellow newbies is to stop paying so much attention to their short-term winrates.
People posting how they were so much up over 2k hands and so much down after 2k hands. It really just doesn't matter. I sympathise or commiserate, it's great, it sucks. But we can't make decisions based on it.

I reckon a good rule of thumb would be that your winrate does not matter until your rate doesn't change (more than 0.1) from session to session.


Okay, this was a long rambly post and I don't know if I've said what I wanted to say. Basically I love looking at my stats, I love studying every little number in PokerTracker. It's just that I feel like I'm trying to fine tune the motor of a leaky boat. And I don't think I'm the only one.