Jolly2702

One other thought before I go, A more accurate way of tracking strength is how badly someone won or lost, and factoring that into variance. If a fight is close, either side could've won, thus they may not necessarily be winning every single time, which means we get more meaningful data faster.

A few tips from an ex pro poker player.

Risk of ruin(going broke) was a key factor in what level of poker one would play, as your bankroll is your livelyhood. This includes any money that you could use to resupply your roll(I played online only, so it was easy to mix your life roll with poker roll if you didn't make strict rules). The problem is, in SB's case, there is no risk of ruin, as you constantly have a resupply of Sbucks if you go broke. The only time you risk "ruining" anything is when you've finally built up a roll to where losing it would mean hours or days of work.

In this case I would never make the minimum bet less than your base resupply(depends on what level you have achieved or if you've given money to SB), according to this: http://saltybet.com/leveling . after that, well, how risk adverse do you want to be? Cash game players that play at stakes just high enough to make a living(in Canada, I would never play lower than $.50/1.00 blinds for no limit holdem, if you know what that is), usually never go below 100 buyins. Others would call this extremely conservative, and for the purposes of SB, I would as well (however 100 buyins would put you well below a 1% risk of ruin, even if you were living off of poker site bonuses). To get a real handle on this, though, you really need to know your winrate.

Winrate in poker is usually calculated at big blinds per 100 hands(bb/100). Buyins are usually calculated at 100 times the big blind(remember that $.50/1.00 thing in the previous paragraph? the .5 is the small blind and the 1 is the big blind, id going into more poker rules, but that would just confuse things). this number was arbitrarily decided to limit the amount of money at a single given table of online poker by the online poker sites, if you're wondering where it came from.

This doesn't help us in this case, except that it does tell us what kind of expected percentages of a buyin we'd expect to see over a given number of bets. these days, if you are winning at 5 bb/100 you are considered a pretty good poker player. The reason I go into this is because it allows us to use a site like this

http://www.reviewpokerrooms.com/poker-games/general/bankroll-requirements.html

to calculate how big of a bankroll we want. We need to use this site because I don't know of a utility that will do it buyins. WARNING: that site uses BB/100, or big bets, which is double the value of bb. this comes from a time when people played limit, not that you care. so if you had a 2% buyin per 100 bets winrate, it would be 2bb/100 or 1BB/100. We still have the problem of standard deviation, which is explained here:

http://easycalculation.com/statistics/standard-deviation.php

once you calculate those numbers, and put it into the first site I linked, out pops a number of big bets(or 2% of our buyin). I apologize if this was overly confusing, because it didn't have to be if I had the right tools. I have a feeling that because of this, all of this extrapolation will lead you down a garden path as far as actual numbers go. Also, it doesn't help that SD is really advanced(I don't really understand it, I had a database myself for all of my poker hands played, and it popped out a number for me based on them).

Anyway, what it comes down to, is that you need a fairly large database of bets to find an accurate SD(I think, math majors probably should look over this and maybe spruce my post up so it is more understandable). The other problem is, that ODDS CHANGE BASED ON AN EXTREMELY LARGE HUMAN FACTOR(twitch chat in this case), and that you won't know the true odds until betting is over. What we could do, is start to track values based on odds for each individual fighter(which will in turn show their general popularity trending), and extrapolate based on past histories(something you are already doing).

But we can take this a step further. At this point we are basically betting with the community(maybe a little bit better due to new bettors, etc.), which is going to get us to break even over time for the most part. What we need is to start factoring favouritism of heroes, chat trolling, etc and use that to size our bets based on when it is most profitable to bet. This is getting into blackjack territory and card counting, but it comes down to this: if we know the value of a certain hero is higher than another, but the odds will not show those numbers, we should be betting bigger the more disparity there is between those two numbers(which could mean we are betting on the hero more likely to fail, if we are getting the right odds). That means that OP heroes, while guaranteed to produce profit, aren't going to produce the biggest margins(unless they are against other OP heroes). This tends to mean that closer matches are the ones we will net the most profit on, and thus should be bet on with bigger bets. Also, the more powerful the two heroes are combined, the more variance there will be in the match, especially if they are extremely close in value to each other(this is the kind of thing that would lower our betting size). As our database improves, we can also start to predict upsets against conventional wisdom(which is different from trolling or troll wisdom, and usually has something to do with how the big bettors that aren't betting their whole bankroll every time are betting, which means we will probably have to start tracking that as well), which will replace close matches as our big money makers. I also think this means we can start tracking keywords in chat, and extrapolating how that affects odds based on W:L records and newness of heroes.

Anyway, hopefully this can get picked up by someone who actually can do math, as you don't actually need to know math to play poker, you just need to value concepts properly.

If you have any questions, PM me here and hopefully I'll see that I have PMs, and that I can help. I come to this site frequently, but I don't comment/use the forums much, so I'm not logged in often/check to see if I have any PMs cause I don't know anyone here.

Oh yea, don't forget that our own bets will have an effect the overall odds, and that the richer we get, the more of an effect we will have.