Hello,
It's been years that I raise this issue with players without ever valid answer other than confirmation.
The idea is that poker is not a game of chance in the long run, except that mathematically the long term tends to infinity. So when we say that after 10000 100000000000 hands and mtt's luck has to "equalize" it's totally absurd. It can be for some players but in theory it does not make sense. It's like throwing a coin a billion times. We will never have a tie between the pile and the face, far from it. It's like poker. The long term is infinite, you can never reach it ... luck in poker would be to reach equilibrium after a finite number of hands ...
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Hi ilmeeturmoney,
You can check out this tool: http://www.pokerdope.com/poker-variance-calculator/
Yes you are right that your luck can be bad for a long long time and you might not get as big upswings than you get downswings. But over a large sample a winning player should still win.
Here is a picture of 5bb/100 winrate with 100bb/100 standard deviation, 100k hand sample:
Spoiler
And here is the same with 1 million hand sample:
Spoiler
So, the luck might not "equalize", but you should still end up winning.
I'm not sure if I follow..
If I understood correctly, you said that the luck won't equalize --> if you have been running bad for a long time, it is not guaranteed you get close to your EV line.
And I agree with that. What I said was that on the long run, in a large sample, you should still end up winning. That doesn't mean you can't run below or above EV.
If you check the pictures you can see that with 5bb true winrate and 100bb/100 standard deviation you will not be losing on the long run. Long run is not defined but you still will be winning.