Bisonbison on Winrates

From time to time, someone will break down and post some or all of the following thoughts:

"How much counts as 'beating a game'?"
"What about crushing?"
"What about crushing Party 2/4?"
"Well, what's the best win-rate a good player can sustain at 2/4?"
"What about if that player moved to 3/6?"
"Or 30/60?"
"What if, instead of good, he was great?"
"Or excellent?"
"Superlative?"
"And if he was playing 2 tables at the same time?"
"How about 6?"
"You know, hypothetically."

We tend to invest a lot of belief in this stuff. And by we, I mean me. Games I play while driving include figuring out what I could make 8-tabling .5/1 40 hours a week, then adding in my 25 hours of 6-tabling 3/6 on top of that. There's a real satisfaction in doing the math to add up the hands per table per hour, and multiply that by this rate or that rate.

I mean, if I could just 8-table 3/6 for 4BB/100 I could make $125 an hour. I could work 5 hours a week. I could play 15 hours of poker on the first of the month, 15 hours on the second, and go on vacation for the rest of the time. I will do this anytime I am alone in my car for more than thirty minutes. This is valuable braintime I could be devoting to the war in Iraq, man's inhumanity to man, or breasts.

There are a few beliefs hiding underneath this obsession with win-rates, and they all have to do with figuring out how good we are:
1. We tend to believe that the numbers are accurate; that they capture not only how well we're doing, but how well we're playing.
2. We tend to believe that the numbers are precise; that there's a significant and meaningful difference between a win-rate of 2.5BB/100 and 2BB/100 over 1 million hands.
3. We tend to believe that the numbers are important; in the end, winning is better than losing and winning more is better than winning less, and the numbers tell us if we're winning and how much.

These beliefs endure because they are true. But they're both true and dumb. They are, in short, convenient places to stop thinking about our games, to stop self-evaluation.

When I'm driving, I rarely find myself thinking "I am unwilling to do a lot of the middle-pair/overcard-kicker/backdoor-draw hand protection that Ed insists is vital" or "I keep forgetting the precise odds I need to draw to 1-14 outs". Yet, near as I can tell, these are accurate observations about my poker game, and areas which, if addressed, could help me play better (and presumably win more Sklansky bucks) from here on out.

More importantly, these are things about my game which only I know and only I could know. I have played about 100k hands at 3/6. My most frequent opponent has been at a table with me for maybe 2% of those hands, very few of which made it showdown. What's he gonna know?

Sure, I post hands, but even though I try to avoid it, a cross-section would show more sets and flushes and straights and trips and boats and pocket aces and so on than is really representative of the times I feel uncomfortable or uncertain at the table. Yet I play dozens and dozens of top-pair-bad-kicker or middle-pair-good-kicker or overcards-with-a-backdoor-draw hands every day, and if I'm making small mistakes in those very frequent hands, they're probably costing me more than medium-sized mistakes in my rarer hands. Ed made a post about this after his book came out, but it's been a while and I've been thinking about this since MAxx's "Eagle ISO the right questions to ask himself" post (which I thought was an excellent way to get going on self-evaluating).

Everyone eventually runs into the limits of their ability to improve passively. Reading books, reading the forums, playing hands in our typical frame of mind, these are all pretty unfocused ways to learn, and they often leave our blind spots pretty much untouched. Posting and responding to posts is better, but it's still open to the same kind of problem: favoring your obvious flaws over ones that may be more fundamental or widespread.

Those questions about win-rates aren't bad in and of themselves, and questions about pokertracker stats aren't stupid, but they're often one or two or twelve steps removed from the actual work it takes to play better. Your ability to diagnose and treat the problems in your game and the ability of the forum to help depend on you comprehending how you play.

If you're a decent player and you can't or won't say "these are the things I'm good at" and "these are the areas where I'm weak", then your improvement is going to stall out. The hand-specific advice you get here just reflects the hands you pick to share, and choosing a better wallpaper for the foyer seems dumb if you don't know that your basement is flooded and the toilets are all vomiting tar.

So I'd just recommend that people stop worrying about their winrates, or other people's winrates, or whether your dog could beat the Party 15/30 game for 1.27BB/100 on a Friday night. Post about the common, everyday decisions that baffle you or make you wince or leave you feeling icky. It's those tangible things that make the winning and losing happen.