I had my best session at NL100 for ages yesterday in online poker and I think it may just be the best ever but I will have to go back through my records to check. I played for three hours and made just over seven buy-ins which ended up at $714! But my style feels powerful now and I think that I have pushed through this stagnating phase. This may just have a profound effect on my online poker challenge because I have gone from 35k to 36k in the blink of an eye.
This leads me to discuss the most important metrics in online poker. You can talk about VPIP/PFR/AF…3-bet percentage and all of the rest of them until the cows come home but they are nothing compared to hours played and dollars won. I see people discuss the merits of theoretically perfect tracker metrics in online poker all the time but you can have great VPIP/PFR/AF figures and if your game selection sucks then you simply are not going to make money in online poker unless you play NL50 and below.
Likewise if you don’t play online poker or you don’t play much poker, it is pretty hard to make money if you don’t play. So clearly then a vital metric is the number of hours that you play but another vital metric is the dollars won figure. I think far too much emphasis is placed on sample sizes. It is true that to have a high confidence level in any earn rate needs a big sample size. But online poker changes constantly and so let us say that you have a sample size of 1 million hands taken over 1 year with an earn rate of 4ptbb/100.
Now clearly over that sample size then 4ptbb/100 will be pretty close to the absolute figure in terms of EV. However this does not alter the fact that you have still only played for one year and the environment may change the following year which means that the 4ptbb/100 figure is no longer valid.
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