About PokerShowdown

Most experienced online poker players can recognize if they are running good or bad. But there is not really a good way to quantify just how good or bad. PokerShowdown quantifies the luck experienced by a player with a set of calculated statistics called "Luck Factors". In general, a Luck Factor greater than one indicates good luck and a luck factor less than one indicates bad luck. For more details on the calculated statistics see the "Luck Factors" tab.

I made a YouTube video about basic usage of PokerShowdown which can be found here: basic usage

Here's an analogy that demonstrates the basics of what PokerShowdown does.

You and a friend are betting $100 on each of 10 coin flips. Your friend will give you $100 each time it comes up heads and you pay your friend $100 for each tails.

After 10 coin flips, the results were 4 heads and 6 tails. You were unlucky and lost $200 to your friend. How unlucky were you? The probablity of one side coming up 6 or more times is 37.7%. Not unreasonable and totally within the range of outcomes.

Now let's say hypethetically you make the same bet over 1 million coin flips. The results were the same ratio of 400,000 heads and 600,000 tails. Would you question the results or just sign the $20,000,000 check over to your friend? Well the odds of this outcome are essentially zero. You have better odds of winning the next lottery jackpot or walking on the Mars.

The great thing is the math doesn't just apply to 50/50 coin flips. The math also applies to poker hands that are 60/40, 80/20, or any other probabilities. This is what PokerShowdown calculates and can quantify just how lucky or unlucky your results are.

In general, PokerShowdown calculates several "Luck Factors" that should converge to 1.0 over a large number of hands. Below is a brief summary of each LF and more details can be found Luck Factors tab.

LF1: Number of wins based on preflop equity. Ex: if you had 1 million hands where each hand you had 40% preflop equity then the expected mean would be for you to win 40% of those hands. Any more or less depends on luck and how the board plays out. This calculation also shows the Number of Standard Deviations (NSD) from the expected mean so that you have an idea of the probability of your specific outcome. NSD should be < 2 in 95% of outcomes: 68,95,99 rule
LF2: Suckout rate / bad beat rate. Bad beats and suckouts are a single event that occurs randomly in poker where one player receives the suckout (lucky) and the other the bad beat (unlucky). Since this event occurs randomly you should experience both at the same rate and LF2 should be near 1.0 (assuming random RNG, fair gameplay, no cheating, etc).
LF3: A measure of average severity of suckouts and bad beats. Severity is determined by the number of chips won (or not won) as well as the probability overcome.
LF4: Good cooler / bad cooler. More details on the Luck Factors tab.
LF5: If LF5 > 1.0, you have received stronger than average starting hands. If LF5 < 1.0, you received weaker than average starting hands.
LF6: To be created. This will calculate Actual EV / Expected EV. Essentially, everytime you put chips in the pot you would be expected to win a percentage of those chips based on the current odds at that stage of the hand. The sum of these actions will be Expected EV. Actual EV will be how many chips were won. If you won more than expected LF6 will be > 1.0 and vice versa.