Explained in 5 Pictures
Winning. Is what you could say about this graph; the person playing poker that produced these results is a winning poker player.
With this graph and no other information given, you could discern that this poker player is indeed winning. To what degree they are winning remains to be seen. But overall, this player is likely to be winning… Right?
Let’s take a look at what the next graph shows us about our player.
Crushing. The 1st graph we looked at is indicated by the red lines. Now that we’ve zoomed out the graph we can say that this player looks to be crushing the game. They are clearly trending upwards and we can now see that that previous graph was just a bit of the ups and downs that naturally come with playing poker.
Now that he’s played a few more hands we know that he is beating the game and is trending upwards at a nice angle. So now we definitely know that our player is really beating this game. He’s got more hands in and is on his way to dominating the tables.
Let’s take a look at the next graph.
Loser. Our poker player is now a huge loser. We’ve zoomed out and now see that our previous graph (indicated by the red lines) was actually just a tiny up-tick in what is actually a very big losing graph.
Our player is in fact not a huge crusher like we thought in the 2nd graph, he’s actually a total degen. He’s a fish, our player is a fish. This is the guy that we sit tables for. He’s the spot. Maybe our player should consider moving down in stakes or taking a break from poker and studying more.
…Or maybe poker isn’t for him.
Maybe in the next graph things will get better for our player?
Break-even. Maybe not all is lost for our player after all. Now that we’ve zoomed out and see that the previous graph (indicated by the red lines), was actually just one of a few decently sized downswings. We also see that he’s had a few equally large upswings as well. Overall our player seems to be a round break-even and maybe back to slightly winning.
At this point we can maybe start to make some claims about our player. He seems to have some trending large downswings in very short succession and some very large upswings vice versa. This might indicate that our player is a bit too spewy in some spots or maybe goes on tilt too often.
If we try and average it out from where the graph starts and where it ends, we can see that it is a slight upward trend. But overall the swings are too large, the volatility of our players winnings are too high, to discern any meaningful win-rate.
Let’s take a look at our final graph and see how our player does.
Printing. Zoomed out to the final graph we see that our player is clearly beating the game. Our player is a winning poker player. Woohoo!
We can now see that the previous graph (indicated by the red lines), was actually just a break-even stretch within a very clearly winning graph. Our player’s graph is actually trending upwards and at a very consistent rate.
Our player started as a small winner, turned into a degenerate spewer and settled into a crusher, all within a few thousand hands.
All this to say…
Poker variance is crazy. Don’t focus on the daily swings, you’ll drive yourself crazy.
