Posted by Dr Fro 8:52 AM

The Astros lost last night to start the season 0-1. Extrapolate that over the season, and they look to go 162-0. By most standards, that is a very bad season. At the same time, Edgar Rentaria hit 2 homers yesterday. Extrapolate that, and he looks to hit 324 homeruns this year. Even in the Steriod Age, that would be considered an above average season.

OK, I am being a bit silly. Extrapolating results from a small sample size is not very meaningful. That said, no sooner than I put up my SNG results did I play three more and won them all. So I am really starting to think that I am on to something.

One of the hardest things in poker for me is figuring out if/when my results are just short-term volatility and when they are truly indicative of a winning strategy. One thing I do know is that I have had slumps and rolls that have lasted months, so I think that looking at results over less than 50 sessions is not likely to reveal much. But I think there is another thing to consider; we'll call it the margin of victory.

I think any time you have a session where a single hands was the difference between winning and losing, it is hardly meaningful to extrapolate those results in figure out your long term EV. Take Sunday night, had the river counterfeited my big hand, I would have lost $80. Instead I won $48. It would not be intellectually honest to look at my victory and declare that I was the best poker player at the table.

Contrast that with my SNG success. Though I don't have the stats on this, I would guess that in 90% of the SNGs, I never had less than 35% of the chips and I rarely was all-in and covered by the other guy's stack. Thus, it was a pretty big margin of victory each time. So, I don't have trouble saying that I think my recent success in SNGs could fairly accurately be extrapolated to approximate my long-term EV.

Unfortuntately, winning ~$10 a pop means that I will have to play a SNG ever day from now until kingdom come to be able to afford to buy into that $10-$20 NL game with Phil Laak.

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