Nat Arem's Blog

The following is a letter that I wrote recently to a well-known person in the poker world … asking for help with regards to rankings on thepokerdb. I’m copying it below so other people can add their thoughts on this issue. I took out parts that aren’t relevant to the general public, but I marked them with a [snip].

[snip],

I have a problem that you might be able to help with … or at least point me in the right direction. I run the site thepokerdb.com and we’ve neglected the task of rating players (and the derivative rankings that would result) for quite awhile, mainly because it seems so difficult. I’m going to at least make an attempt in the next week or two to write a formula to rate players from 0 to 1 with 0 being the worst performers and 1 being the best. I’d present it on the site out to three decimal places, effectively giving everyone a rating from 0 to 1000.

In terms of the factors to be included, I’ve come up with at least a preliminary list of what I find important in judging performance strictly from a results perspective:

1. Played
2. FT Rate/Field Size
3. ITM Rate/Field Size
4. Top 3 Rate/Field Size
5. Average Finish
6. ROI
7. Average Buyins Won

It’s clear that they should not be equally weighted, but I’m not sure how to best weight them. I’m also fairly certain it would be incorrect to linearly apply the respective “credit” to the rating coming from each factor (ie, the first 1000 tournaments played are worth more than the last 1000 out of 20000 — not that we have that many results for anyone anyway). Basically I think there may be a marginal drop in relative utility for most of the stats as more samples are included, but the approximate rate of decrease has eluded me. Another issue is finding a way in the formula to “cap” the ranking at a certain level with 1000 being the best player(s) with regards to past performance. Lastly, it’s unclear how to apply these statistics to different time periods … such as the relative importance of number played over the last week v the last month v the last year. Obviously we’re not dealing with statistically significant sample sizes, but the fact remains that our users would like to see at least a reasonable attempt at rating people over non-statistically significant sample sizes.

[snip]. I’m sure you’re busy and I know there aren’t any “right” answers to this question (and it might not even matter if there were right answers due to sample size issues), but I’d appreciate any help or guidance with regards to where I can find help.

Thanks,

–
Nat Arem
www.thepokerdb.com

——–

UPDATE: Add an 8th factor: Average Buyin. Thanks for pointing that one out Ken.

I’m about a month into my law school experience and it has been interesting so far. I’ve noticed some stark changes between this academic experience and my undergrad experience.

1. More reading.

It’s actually not THAT much more reading than I did in undergrad, but it’s definitely a noticeable uptick in page requirements. There are also little things that make it more extensive. For example, the books are pure text with virtually no pictures or diagrams to shorten the actual text length. In addition, the reading itself is a lot harder. Trying to parse the words from a 5 page case from 19th century England takes me just as long as reading 25 pages of undergrad textbook fluff. When you have to read 4-8 of those types of cases for each class and you have 2-3 classes a day, it adds up to a lot of reading — every day.

2. Level of understanding.

The professors demand a high level of understanding on the part of the students. This isn’t like undergrad where you can skim the text, listen and take notes in class and still get an A at the end of the semester. You have to take notes on all of the reading and you have to brief, or summarize, all of the cases. The professors randomly call on people to explain the cases and problems in the textbook, so you basically have to be prepared at all times. And it’s not like they just ask “what happened in this case” … they ask things like “how does the rule described by the court in this case differ from this case we read two weeks ago?” or “how would the rule be applied in this type of hypothetical situation?”. So the bottom line is that you have to really understand the case/general topic area prior to class and you also have to be able to think on your feet in front of 70 other smart people. It’s not easy.

3. All important final exam.

The good news about all of that participation stuff is that it really doesn’t count for your final grade. The bad news is that if you don’t get an understanding of the material in class, you’ll likely do poorly on the final unless you can catch up somehow during the course of the semester. And the final is everything … 100% of your grade. So you work for over 3 months and your grade in each class comes down to about 3 hours of performance. It sounds like a stressful time period. And for those of you who say “screw grades” you’re obviously not a candidate for law school. Everyone here seems to be grade-obsessed, especially because it’s so important for employment. The way jobs work is you are interviewed for summer internships during the fall of your 2nd year, so all the firms have to look at is your first year grades. And the way to get interviews with the best firms is pretty simple: get good grades. And that’s about the only way to get those interviews without extensive family connections. So you have 8 exams plus a few papers for your legal writing classes (you have four classes each semester plus legal writing). The summer internships are the key to full-time offers. That means your jumping off point in the legal profession will, in large part, be determined by 24 hours of performance. So you’ve got to be at your best. Of course, mediocre grades don’t mean you won’t be a good lawyer in the long-run, it just means you’ll have a very tough road with regards to getting a good job out of law school.

Conclusion:

So you now know about some of the major differences I’ve noticed so far. It’s a very different academic experience, but it’s one that I think I’ll enjoy. I like the pressure of the big final exam and I think there are some key strategic and tactical plays to be made that will make my grades a lot better without significantly greater effort. We’ll see how things play out.

This had me laughing for awhile. Actually I’m still laughing.

This day might be the single day best performance on Stars — at least it’s the best that I know of. It happened over a month ago, but I just noticed it.

Date Tournament/Event Place Entrants Winnings

08/07/2006 Hold’em NL $150 3 628 $8,666
08/07/2006 Hold’em NL $20+Rebuys 1 546 $12,705
08/07/2006 Hold’em NL $100+Rebuys 2 160 $11,200
08/07/2006 Hold’em NL $50+Rebuys 10 217 $480
08/07/2006 Hold’em NL $100+Rebuys 9 108 $638

Note that I am including all of the tournaments he played — this isn’t leaving out a bunch of non-cashes.

His accomplishments:

1. 5 cashes. While cashes don’t mean much unless you go deep in the money, he also…
2. … made 4 final tables and came within one spot of making it 5. Of course, final tables are meaningful, but what’s even more meaningful are…
3. … top 3 finishes because that’s where all the money is. And he had three of those out of 5 played. I know most STT players would be happy with that, especially with a 1st, 2nd and 3rd. And those players are only facing 8 or 9 other players. In an MTT context, that is just sickening.
4. Beyond all of that, all of these tournaments are tough. The 100r tournament on Stars is generally accepted as the toughest daily field in online tournament poker. The 150 isn’t easy either considering the lack of satellites and the relatively quick structure. The 50r and 20r are probably the easiest tournaments on this list, but they certainly aren’t easy by most standards — not only that, they have relatively large fields.

I know other people point to Ozzy’s day where he won two 11r tournaments and got 2nd in the 150. And the day that Jeff won both the 100r and 50r. Those day were undoubtably some of the best single day performances in the history of online tournament poker. But I nominate lilholdem’s performance as a notch above those two and I contend that it is the best.

Even though I had fun playing around with the CSS-based overhaul that I gave PSDollars.com last time, I wasn’t happy with the way the site looked.

Therefore, it received another overhaul today. I personally think it looks WAY better.

I hired a graphics guy to do the work on the site and it definitely shows. There are probably graphics people out there who will say it sucks, blah, blah, etc, but I’m happy with it. This is the avatar:

Oh, and I also introduced live trading, which means that we process all orders automatically. So now people won’t have to wait to receive their cash when they trade in T$ or W$.

All in all, it’s a big improvement… take a look

I received 7 submissions, 6 of them serious.

Here they are in order of how I received them (received earliest on the top). In each case, I put the original logo on the right side.

Submission 1 – the winner:

Submission 2:

Submission 3:

Submission 4:

Submission 5:

Submission 6 – very very close, but received well after submission 1: