Run Good Ratio

First of all week one of weight loss 2.0 is going swimmingly.  I started at 172.0 on Monday and tipped in at 168.6 this morning.  Obviously the first few pounds are the easiest, but I anticipate I'll need the head start a month or two from now when I'm struggling to get past 162 or so.  Anyway, on the point of the post.

Why is it that you do your best thinking in the shower?  It seems like you always hear about people having great ideas in there.  I took a short one today after a swim at our community pool and came up with a  new poker statistic, one that you can calculate for both live and online poker, and could even be included in something like HEM.  This isn't ground breaking stuff, but it was a pretty fun idea for a 4 minute rinse off shower that didn't involve shampoo.  Ladies and gentleman, I present now for your critique, "Run Good Ratio", a statistic that takes the unending frustrating of getting destructicated every time you move up and boils it down to just a single, lonely, number.

Here is how you calculate RGR in just a few easy steps;  I'll run through it for an example live Commerce grinder over the course of just 100 hours (to make the math easy).  Let's suppose his results are as follows:

20/40 - 20 hours, +40 bets

40/80 - 50 hours, +30 bets

60/120 - 30 hours, -10 bets


First we need to calculate his bets per hour, which is obviously .6 (since he won 60 bets in 100 hours). Next we need to calculate his total winnings, in dollars.  That's $1600 + $2400 - $1200, for $2800.  Easy so far, right?  Another number we'll need is his dollars won per hour, which in this case is obviously $28.   After that, the next number we want to have is his "average stake played", which is calculated as:

( (20*20) + (40*50) + (60*30) ) / 100 =  (400+2000+1800)/100 = 42

This means that on average he played stakes of 42/84, which intuitively makes sense since he played a lot of 40 and a little more 60 than 20.  We're almost there now.  Using his average staked played (of 42) and his big bets per hour (of .6) we can calculate his "running average dollars per hour" rather easily (remember I have to multiply by two to convert the 42 to a big bet):

42 * 2 * .6 = $50.4/hour

And if anybody is still following along he can probably figure out what I'm going to do next.  I did, after all, use the word ratio to name my statistic and haven't yet shown you a fraction.  RGR then is defined simply as actual dollars earned per hour over "running average dollars per hour".  In the case of our example grinder the number works out to:

28/50.4 = .555

In short, he did better when he played smaller than his average stakes, and worse when he played higher, and therefore posted an RGR of (substantially) less than one.  Obviously "running average" would equate to an RGR of exactly one, but that's really true given that bigger games are probably tougher and actual win rates should be lower in them.  But the general idea is pretty simple;  a small number means a failed shot, while a larger one means you brought the luck box with you to the big game.  I suspect that many live grinders will have RGRs substantially below one, due to some combination of survivorship bias and the peter principle (those who make it tended to run hot originally, when they were presumably playing smaller, and many tend to promote themselves up to their own level of incompetence).  I don't have time to calculate mine for the year right now, but I have a feeling it's between 1.5 and 2.0.  Lifetime, though...who knows.  And I'm not really sure how useful it is in either the short or long ish term;  it seems most useful for like a one year (or season) sample size.  Any way, that's my new stat.  If you followed along, good for you.  If not, try again :)