Yeah I wanted to ask the same question with regards to TourneyLuck. When your difference line is negative, you're running bad but since I don't know what other people's graph look like, it's hard to judge how bad you're doing. I mean how bad is bad. What's very bad?
Also when you look at things from a tournament chip point of view, things can be grossly misleading. If you have a big suckout or even win a coinflip at the last 2 tables of a tournament where the pots are in tens or hundreds of thousands (sometimes even millions), the results will be significantly affected by that one results. Since final 2 tables are relatively rare compared to the volume of tournaments one plays, you can't have enough hands at that level for things to even out.
Let's takes my tournament graph for instance. I won A4 against 88 at the final 2 tables of a tournament in January and while the pot represented say 30 BBs it was in the hundred's of thousands. Now this is just one dominated suckout yet it completely overwhelms the rest of the data. Now had the program showed two bad beats that happenned to me in November where I lost a multi-million dollar pot at the final table KK against 1010 and a few weeks before that AA against J8
(those happenned in the months just before I installed PT), the difference line would have tanked by a few millions making the A4 vs 88 500K pot relatively insignificant in comparison.
Obviously a single 500K pot suckout at the business end of the tournament can't make up for 100 5K pots bad beats lost early in an MTT or 1000 $500 pots lost in SNGs.
Perhaps over the very long term and after many final tables and legions of final 2 and 3 tables the result would even out of but it would take years if not decades for you to line up 100 final tables and thousands of final 2 or 3 tables large field MTTs where the pots grow to such massive amounts.
Looking at the number of BBs you were expected to win or lose is a much better way to assess things although I have given it some thoughts and that also has significant limitations. For instance, because your stack has more BBs at the begining of a tournament than at the end of the tournament (you start with 75 to 150 BBs whereas in mid tourney the average stack is about 20BBs), a negative difference line could simply be representative of the fact that you had a lot of bad beat early when the blinds were low relative to the average stack size. But at least it allows you to compare things that are comparable.
Anyway it's a good question. Looking at my graph and yours, I see a red line under the zero level but I have no idea how bad that is compared to other people's. I meant to post about this very subject actually. Can anyone tell us what your graphs look like? What kind of range do you guys have? And in your opinion what is slightly unlucky, very unlucky and... I'd be careful next time you cross the road type of bad luck!
)... just make an extra graph for "Coinflips".
