T-I-L-T

[Garth Kay]

Long term, setting goals that are unrealistic works against you, in my opinion.

Almost unrealistic Dave.

But I am a big believer of being drive by the thought of success rather than fear of failure (which is the mindset of many people I know). I like setting myself Big Hairy Audacious Goals!

I also find that what may be unrealistic today is quite often easily achievable tomorrow, you never test yourself and you never find your true abilities unless you push yourself to achieve the unachievable.

[David]

I know what you said, just was another thought.

I'm not saying goal-setting is negative, nor setting goals slightly out or your reach.
But, setting goals that you consistently don't attain can sometimes do a person more harm than good.

[madali]

One of my favorite quotes


“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.”

So maybe you did not reach your goal but from all accounts you did start to hit your stride again. And maybe you did reach your goal if your goal was not solely to win but to find your motivation and passion to chase the win. I also think this experience will be great for your confidence and I see great things happening for you again in the future.

[muzzington]

I think you're spending too much time goal-making.

[the dols]

I think benny the cunt needs to where his pocket protector when he is playing poker!!

also, ill go through the maths that i used to work out the odds. (for those that aren't great with maths, skip about halfway down to where i started making estimations about jo's game)

The mathematical construct used in these situations is called a binomial distribution, which models the success of n indepentent yes/no trials, where the probability of success is p.

the probability of getting k successes in n trials, with success probability p is given by


where




in our example, n = 5, the number of tournaments, k is the number of wins, and p is the probability of a win.

now in our case, jo's success is k >= 1 (i.e 1 or more wins). so to work out the probability, we actually work out the probability of jo not winning at all, and then take one minus that number (this way, we get the probability of 1,2,3,4, or 5 wins)

i did it by hand the first time, but then i found an online calculator which lets you play around with the numbers easily
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________


now i will tell you how i went about calculating jo's average

first, i went through jo's results online.

since season 1 2010, he has played live 228 games, for 6 wins and 71 final tables.

this is a win percentage of 2.63% and a final table percentage of 31.14%


so now we have the parameters to plug into the binomial distribution.

n = 5, k = 1, p = 0.0263

plugging these in gives a probability of 1 or more wins as 12.48%, or odds of approximately 8:1


BUT

i figured that jo, like the rest of us when we play 888pl, doesn't take it seriously most of the time, so i estimated his win rate to be up to 3 times as high as his long term win rate because there was something on the line.

so i figured jo's win rate might actually be as high as 7%. (rightly or wrongly, this was my estimation)

if we use p = 0.07, and re-calculate the number, then we get the probability of at least 1 win P(X>=1) = 0.3043, or 3.3:1.

thus, when i was setting the odds, i decided to go slightly in my favour and set them at 2.6:1. you could argue that my estimate of jo's win rate was too high but meh.

i did the same thing with the final table percentage, but i used jo's long term final table percentage to calculate the odds of a final table, and it turns out that, jo will make a final table at least once in 5 games, 84% of the time. so thats where the 1:7 odds came in, but i was always expecting to lose that bet as i didn't take into account a higher percentage from jo playing properly.



so hopefully i have explained it ok. basically if you use the online calculator you dont need to know any of the maths and you can still work out some stuff.


if you ever want to have any more of these challenges, i am happy to give you some more action, but i guess the odds will be different this time as you will know more about what odds are realistic.

Cheers

Barb

[bennymacca]

I think benny the cunt needs to where his pocket protector when he is playing poker!!

thanks for your insightful input

(it does help that i am an engineer though, makes the poker maths easy to understand, even though this isn't purely poker maths per se)

[David]

Use some of that engineering and change your avatar.

[bennymacca]

Use some of that engineering and change your avatar.

whats wrong with it?

[David]

[bennymacca]

not working for me