Bankroll graph and my brief RPP bio

I scraped the data from the Bank page, plugged it into Google Spreadsheets, and generated a graph.

And some analysis:

  1. My initial account creation. I took my starting free chips, and played small stakes ring games, for about two months. Steadily building my bankroll, I thought I was a good player right away. My banroll grew to somewhere under 200,000, when I had a particularly bad day, and went completely bust. It’s difficult to remember back that far, but I know I had the expectation that as I won games, my chip stack should grow at an accelerating rate. I think a few days to a week after moving from Low to Medium stakes was when I lost several buy-ins and re-buys at a ring game table, and burned through a few months worth of winnings. Disgusted and disheartened, I didn’t want to start over, and wasn’t sure I wanted to.
  2. I continued to log in to the site daily, collecting bonus chips, but not playing, for nearly two years. During this time, my bankroll slowly regenerated at a rate of about 2500 chips/day, for the most part, although I would miss a day pretty frequently and have to build the daily bonus back up from 500. For the first few months of this, I considered playing each time I logged in, but didn’t have the heart to, because I didn’t have any confidence that I could win chips. I wasn’t sure if I would ever feel like trying to play again, or when that might be, but since it took half a second and didn’t hurt anything to collect the bonus chips, I accumulated them. Eventually I had gathered about 1.2M in daily bonus chips.
  3. At a company picnic, we had a professional poker dealer for part of the entertainment. I sat down and played a bit, and was having fun with no-value chips, winning a few hands before getting beat by a Straight on a hand where I had two pair and no clue. After the picnic, I decided to start playing again and got back into RPP. This time, instead of playing Ring Games, I tried playing SNG tournaments. For the next three months, I was playing 4-6 9-seat SNG games/day, typically placing in the money about 1 in 3, typically 3rd or 2nd place, just barely breaking even on a good day, and slowly losing chips on most days. I lost more than I won overall, and continued to until I had burned through about half of my bankroll.
  4. By the end of September, I had learned enough to turn it around, and started winning more than I lost, and brought my bankroll back up. The Green trend line shows where I would have been if I had simply continued to collect the Daily Bonus chips. You can see that I made up ground more quickly than I had lost, and by the end of October, I had briefly touched that trend line, catching up to where I would have been if I wasn’t playing and just collected bonus chips. I improved my game through studying my play, using these forums, and by playing a lot of 3-Max games, which is where I started to figure out how to do well in short-handed situations with a high blind-to-stack ratio, which is crucial to being able to finish a SNG profitably. I was doing well in 3-Max, winning a bit better than 1-in-3, sometimes considerably better, but continued to learn and grow stronger, which contributed to a higher win rate in the 9-seat format. Overall, I continued to struggle, though, and through early December I was oscillating, but breaking about even overall for the period of Oct-Nov. Winning some weeks, then having a bad day and losing a few hundred thousand chips in a day or two, then adjusting my game, fixing a hole, and rebuilding. Often my rebuilding was through playing Ring Games for an hour, until I doubled my 125K buy-in to 250K, then switching back to tournament format games, where I would continue to struggle. Over this period, my bankroll grew at about the pace of the Daily Bonus trendline, but my performance was still below where I would have been if I wasn’t playing. By about January, I had improved my game enough that I was no longer losing chips playing SNG games, and no longer needed to play Ring to rebuild when I wasn’t winning enough tournaments.
  5. Finally, by early March my chip winnings exceeded the Daily Bonus trendline, and by this time I had switched over to focus entirely on SNG and MTT play. The sudden vertical leaps mostly represent either a MTT first-place finish, or weekly Astral League Leaderboard bonus chips won. So overall, I’m gradually winning over the course of a week, then hitting a windfall through a big MTT payday, or the leaderboard awards. Sometimes I’m able to put together a 2-3 day period where I win most of my games, and other times I’ll go through a downturn for a day or two. I’m still going through this, having just corrected a few problems that I had worked myself into with my game over this past week. It’s hard to know, but I feel at this point that I may have turned the corner again, and am going to play more consistently from here on.
  6. I had a very hot April, winning about 2-3M chips over a period of 3 weeks, through a combination of MTT wins and Astral SNG League bonuses on top of chips won through winning SNG tournaments. Most of my SNG money finishes were 1st place wins. In late April, I went on vacation and wasn’t able to play much, but came back in May, and resumed winning at a strong pace, before struggling a bit over the last two weeks.

Where I will go from here, I’m not sure. For the past month, I’ve been playing mostly SNG, with nearly no MTT play during this time. I’d like to get back into MTT play, and see if I can increase my mastery the format, and improve my win rate. Once I’m winning consistently (by which, I mean, taking in chips in more than 50% of my games played, I guess. I’m also contemplating jumping from Medium to High stakes, and getting into the 50,000 buy-in SNG games. If I can win at the same rate there, my bankroll growth will accelerate.

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I’m almost positive you would sustain your win rate jumping to these stakes, and your bank roll is very healthy for them. I say GO FOR IT. If you have a bad month and drop 1M playing 50K’s you can always drop back down till and rebuild. Pretty sure you could play 100K’s too. Winning SnG players do not need to carry as big a bank roll as MTT players because the fields your playing are much smaller so win rates for good players are easier to maintain. I would shot take higher stakes with anything in my bankroll that was over a 20 buy in mark for the games I’m currently and regularly beating at the moment.

A few people have asked me about/suggested that I try moving up to 50,000 buy-in SNG, and I’m reluctant to do it until I get my win rate up at these stakes. I feel like where I’m at is fine, but if I can prove that I’ve fixed the holes in my game this month, I might try moving up next month. I’m still only just breaking even at this point, most of my “profit” seems to be from bonus chips and promotions.

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I decided to do my own graph. I’ve had my ups and downs, but the graph speaks for itself…

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Is that for real? That’s surprisingly… linear. It doesn’t look at all natural.

Hahaha. Pug, it, " speaks for itself." It also says, “win.”

Yanno, if I have to 'splain this stuff…

Lol, I couldn’t read it until I did the puggy head tilt.

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Inspired by Puggy, below are two views of my own bankroll graph. The first is “undoctored,” plotting my balance after each transaction, against what my bankroll would have been if I’d collected my daily bonus each day since I started.

This next one is a bit more insightful. Although I created an account in January 2016, aside from a very small handful of ring games and low-stakes tournaments (with no wins), I didn’t really start playing on RP in earnest until November of that year. I didn’t even log in between Feb 1, 2016 and Nov 17, 2016. No sense in giving me “credit” for almost 750K chips when I didn’t do anything on the site during that period.

Up until about mid-July 2017, I was basically breaking even. No significant wins, no significant losses. In the April/May timeframe, I decided to focus more on heads-up, and played a bunch of HUSNGs. After I noticed my winrate begin to pop, I decided to shift more to tournaments, using what I’d learned at the heads-up tables to turn my deep runs into wins. The big discontinuities from October 2017 through February 2018 are from major MTT wins that brought big pops to my bankroll.

In 2018, due to some personal issues, I took an extended break. Even when I was playing, my head wasn’t fully on straight, and from February 2018 through November 2018 my bankroll was pretty constant, hovering between 5M and 6M.

Since then, I’ve retooled my game. A couple of solid MTT wins in late 2018 boosted my to just under 9M by the end of the year. I then decided to switch to ring games, which don’t require waiting for an appropriately-sized tournament to start. Getting laid off in mid-April gave me the chance to play a lot more (still only about 5-10 hours a week in between interviews), and you can see the results showing up as a much more rapid growth in my bankroll.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to attain my goal of getting into the top 1000 before heading back to work. My first day at a new company is tomorrow, and I’m currently sitting at rank 1263. That’s much better than the ~1700 rank I had two months ago, with a bankroll roughly 50% healthier, so I’m not complaining too much.

Long story short, it took a while for me to figure out how to crush it here, though being free of the curse of the drinking classes has proven marvelously beneficial. If you’re having trouble growing your bankroll, read the forums, talk with other players, figure out what you’re doing wrong (and they’re doing right!), and be open to criticism so that you can improve. Almost as important - try to avoid sitting at the same table as me. :slight_smile:

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Impressive graph. But on several days you have two (or more) balances showing, like the one here.

comn%2016

So, in thinking more about the graph of my transaction data, I’ve realized that I have an error which makes the trend line misleading.

The green line for the daily bonus growth is based on the period during which I was only logging in daily and not playing. So there was at most one transaction per day, +500-2500.

When I started playing again, I was playing anywhere from 0-6+ games per day, and each game is really 1-2 transactions: one for the buy-in, and possibly one for chips won.

The slope of the daily bonus trend line is, basically, 500-2500 per day, but when I start having multiple transactions per day, there are multiple data points per day, which stretches each day out horizontally. I don’t get a daily bonus per transaction, so drawing the line out like it is in the original graph is misrepresenting how much I’m getting in daily bonus, by quite a bit,depending on how many transactions I have in a given day, which varies day to day.

So to correct this, I need to cull the data and only show one data point per day. Then the horizontal axis will represent a regular interval, and the daily bonus line will be accurately projected into the period when I started actively playing again.

I’ll have to take some time to get a corrected graph, but I expect the result will be that the daily bonus trend line will be much flatter than it appears in the original graph, and accordingly my performance relative to the daily bonus is much better than what it looks like, in other words i really have been doing much better than breaking even during much of this time.

I could just filter out the bonuses, and subtract them from the bankroll total, but it’s a bit tricky to do. Spreadsheet calculations should be possible, though, to make it automatic, but they’re a bit complicated to set up. I will try and post a new result when able.

That’s because I am also a time traveler. That was supposed to be a secret. Now I might have to go back in time and make sure your parents never meet!

The graph, like every image I have ever posted, is the result of my imagination and PhotoShop. Don’t be alarmed if my imagination and reality don’t mesh that well. :slight_smile:

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Well, Harrington said “every time you enter a pot you risk your whole stack”…with that in mind I see little point in graphs…playing in games one can afford, that is a different matter

County, I don’t get your point. This is a graph of my bankroll, which is only indirectly related to the stack in any given hand I choose to enter.

I find the data analytics to be interesting and informative. By looking at my growth, I can see my progress in learning to play better poker correlated to outcomes in a way that is much more reliable than memory and “feel”.

The whole time I’ve been playing, I’ve thought of myself as a “good” player. But the numbers show that I’ve only been break-even for relatively short time, and doing well for really only the last two months. But yet over that time I’ve also demonstrated significant improvement in the quality of my game, and it really shows in the graph.

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Here’s a new graph of my bankroll over time, with the data showing chips actually won in ring and tournament play. All daily bonuses, league awards, and other promotions are subtracted out in this graph, showing only the chips actually won in play, or from tournament wins, excluding the weekly/monthly leaderboard awards.

Puggywug's%20Adjusted%20RPP%20Winnings

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Congratulations! Best of luck with your new gig.

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For what it’s worth, here’s mine.

The daily bonuses don’t really show up on the chart so here are the totals by transaction type.

Transaction Type Total
Admin 35,000
Daily Bonus 889,000
Prize won 206,375
Refund 100,000
Ring Game 1,178,464,202
Tournament 3,969,820
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Here’s another look at the data. This time, I normalized the data by taking the last data point from each day. This means that the horizontal axis represents a regular interval of time, regardless of what section of the graph you’re looking at. Well, nearly; on skip days I didn’t play or collect the daily bonus, my bankroll didn’t change. There’s relatively few of those, but if they were inserted into the data to fully normalize the horizontal axis, there would be a few flat stretches. This took a lot of manual data massaging to put together, but I think it’s worth it to have a distortion-free view of how my bankroll has grown over time.

Puggywug's%20Daily%20Bankroll

That looks very solid, clearly you have been doing very well at all the stakes you’ve played at. Looks like this is over a pretty large sample as well. Out of interest do you know your ROI% and ITM% at the different SnG levels? I’d say 50% is probably achievable but it’s certainly ambitious.

For what it’s worth, I have a different approach on this site. My feeling is that by playing with significantly less conservative bankroll management I will increase my average winrate a lot and have a shot at reaching the top even if I do risk huge swings and even the possibility of having to start over. Ultimately it’s play money and I’d rather have a chance of becoming a replay billionaire than being too careful.

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@MattyBall, offhand I don’t know either of those, but if I sit down and sift through my Activity log I might be able to pull that info out. It’d sure be nice if Replay provided a full API, or at least a reportbuilder to make getting the data easier.

Offhand, if I were to guess, I’d say that my ITM% in SNG is probably about 33% or more, but definitely well below 50%. This week, through my first 19 games, I’m ITM 12/19, 63%, and that’s much better than last week, after fixing some holes in my game I am running very good right now.

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I made a Chrome extension inspired by this thread which adds a chart of your bankroll history to the Transactions page. Click your chip balance in the top nav on the right then click “See all transactions” with the extension installed to see your chart

I wouldn’t normally suggest downloading random extensions, they can be a privacy and security risk, but if anyone wants to try this one I guarantee it is safe. The source code is published here if anyone wants to verify, collaborate, or install it manually :slight_smile:

It will take up to a minute to show your chart for the first time if you have a lot of transactions, but should load faster from that point on - it has to fetch your bankroll history from the server in small batches, but then stores the information in your browser so it only has to get new records the next time

My chart is a bit crazy - somewhere around January I decided to try and play a bit looser, and call more at the same time… well you can see how that’s playing out lol…

In the beginning I was slow to start, trying to get my bearings and figure out the game… I’d only played at some home games and didn’t really know what I was doing. I somehow managed to build it up, and maybe by fluke won a Bankroll Builder, before eventually squandering the ~700k winnings and starting from scratch again.

It took a long few weeks(?) tapping the Get Free Chips button to learn the hard way that this is a game of discipline, patience and bankroll management… or at least that’s the foundation the rest of it is built on

I took a deep dive of watching videos, live events and commentaries trying to figure out how you’re supposed to actually learn and play this game, coming to the conclusion it’s something like a mix between b-u-l-l-s-h-i-t, rock paper scissors, and stochastic chess…

I spent a lot of time playing and practising from then on

The first big jump in November 2018 I think was was when I bought into my first 250k tourney, Ruthie’s Round-up. I ended up coming first through a combination of luck and doggedly trying my best not to waste my first big buy-in :slight_smile: which I really enjoyed

The instant downward spike at the start of December was when I bought into a 5M tourney by mistake, or folly, and then unregistered as soon as possible :stuck_out_tongue:

At the start of April I bought into a 1M tourney, and ended up coming first or second :slight_smile:

I have lost so many buy-ins, 100k, 250k and I think even 1m on one occasion through missing tourneys and sit-n-go’s, not hearing or getting notifications, etc…

But I love this site and play for fun, it just makes it an extra challenge. It’s a pleasure to experiment with new styles, learn from and chat with everyone here

Looking forward to many more games and hope to see everyone at the tables

By the way @puggywug, if you want to try a 50k SnG, or even a 100k you will be more than welcome

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