A Cold Hard Truth

I decided to take a look at my HEM stats for the first time in a while. Not the stats that define how I play, but the stats that define my results. What I found wasn't terribly surprising in retrospect, but really has made me think about what I need to do in order to improve and keep playing this game for a living. The following three graphs pretty much sum it up, which are for all the hands in my database at 2/4 and 3/6 (unilaterally the numbers are better at 2/4, because the games are softer and the rake structure is actually better I think....you tend to get more than 50% more rakeback money for playing 3/6, which means they are raking more than 50% more on average, which means it's a worse structure). First, all hands that I played 7-ways or more:

Without a horrendous downswing early on (which was at 3/6 and was the reason I switched to trying to play 6-max games several months ago...it looks way worse when this thing is plotted in dollars, not big bets), this graph would be stupifyingly good. With it, it's still a very respectable win rate of more than 1 bet per 100, with rakeback (the blue line) adding in some extra win rate and padding out the break even stretches. It's only 17K hands, but it's pretty good looking so far. At 2/4 only it looks even better. Next, we'll have a look at my play 5-6 handed:

Meh....this is not great, obviously, but it is still indicative of actually winning. Actually it started off pretty well, but the 400 bets I've lost over the last 35K hands or so is extremely discouraging. Once again, it looks much, much better for just the 2/4 hands, with me actually losing (before rakeback) at all 3/6 hands dealt 5-6 ways to date. One might be tempted to say this sample size is adequate, but really it's not. It's enough to know that I'm not randomly clicking buttons, but it's not really enough to say with much confidence anything but "you probably are a small winner". Ah yes then, here we go my friends, the the cold hard truth. Here is my graph for hands dealt 4 ways or fewer:

Great googely moogely. Some of that is hopefully run bad; it's almost impossible for me to believe that I could be that inadequate short handed. Losing 5 big bets per 100 in the long run would be legendary. But even though I only have 7K hands here, there can really be no debate that I am a loser when the hand is dealt 4 ways or fewer. So what should I do? I've known that I'm not a great short handed player for some time now, but I thought in the back of my mind that I was getting better, that I was improving, and that it really wasn't that big of a short coming. Well these graphs pretty much nix that idea. I guess it's basically back to the drawing board.....