I fought the law and the law won

I had one of those days. Every pair held, every draw got there, and every close spot went my way. I drove home doing the arithmetic on my hourly rate in my head and liking every version of it.

The next day I went back. Not to chase anything. I told myself I would just play my normal game, the same game that had been working all along, and my average would be fine. One ordinary session was not going to touch a number like that.

By the dinner break I had given back a good piece of it, and the drive home was quieter.

The day before was not my normal game

This is the part I did not want to hear. My normal game did not make the draws come in. The cards did. My normal game was there, doing what it always does, and the cards turned up on top of it.

The running bad guide has an example player I like, because the example is honest about how much of a result is noise. They win 5 big blinds an hour, with a standard deviation of 50. At $1/$2 that is $10 an hour, and over a six hour session they expect to win about $60.

A day like that is not a reading on their skill. It is a reading on their skill with a very large dose of luck mixed in, and from inside the session there is no way to tell how much of each went into it.

The average does not come to collect

Here is the thing I had backwards. I thought of the law of averages as something that would come looking for me, that a great day had to be paid for with a bad one. That is not how it works. The cards do not remember Tuesday.

What happens is plainer and somehow worse. The next session is drawn from the same distribution as every other session I have ever played. Yesterday does not make it better and it does not make it worse. It is just an ordinary day, and ordinary days are rough more often than it feels like they should be.

For the example player, an ordinary six hour session ends in a loss 40% of the time. It gives back $250 or more, half of the great day, about one time in ten. That is not a cold streak. That is one session in ten, with nothing wrong.

So when the law of averages showed up the very next day, it was not catching up with me. It was just Wednesday. I fought the law, and the law did not even have to try.

Even a normal day lowers the number

The part that surprised me most is that I did not need a losing day for my average to drop. Any ordinary day does it.

Say the example player has 60 hours logged at exactly their 5 big blinds an hour, which is $600. Then the great day: $500 in six hours. Their hourly jumps from $10 to $16.67. That number feels like information. It feels like proof that something has clicked.

Now they come back and have an exactly average day, $60 in six hours. Not good, not bad, the most likely result there is. Their hourly goes down to $16.11.

If they break even it goes to $15.28. If they give back $250 it goes to $11.81, and they have played the same on all three days.

That is the law of averages, and it is the whole of it. A number that one lucky day pushed up comes back toward where the player really is, and every session after it does a bit of the pushing. It does not need a bad beat. It does not need me to play badly. It only needs more hours, and they always arrive.

Did I play my normal game?

I would like to say yes. I think I did. But I notice I am not sure, and I notice why.

After a day like that you are not quite at baseline. Everything worked, so the marginal call feels like the right call and the thin value bet feels thick. Nobody calls that tilt, because tilt is supposed to feel bad. It does not feel bad. It feels like confidence, and it is one of the few states where you can play worse while feeling better than usual.

I do not have a hand from that second day I can point to. I did not write any down, because I was not expecting the day to be interesting. That is the mistake I can actually fix.

What I do now

I do not look at the hourly after one great day. It is the least reliable that number will ever be, and it is reliable in exactly the direction I want to believe.

I log the great day like any other session, the same way I log the bad ones, because it is one session out of all of them and should get one session's worth of weight. And I write down a hand or two from the day after, because the day after is when I am least likely to notice that my normal game has quietly drifted.

If the hard part for you is the day after a great one, the walk back from I have figured this out to a baseline where each decision gets made on its own, that is what Untilt is for. Feeling invincible is a state too, and it is worth checking before you sit down.

Log is free, all of it, and works offline with no account. It will tell you your real hourly rate, which after one great day is a smaller number than the one you were doing in your head on the drive home.