The midpoint hypothesis

Last night, I kept the streak alive; I won my third session in a row. Considering how things have been going lately, that's a major accomplishment! Looking at the bar chart of my stack size over the course of the session, a new poker theory occurred to me; I call it the midpoint hypothesis. The hypothesis is simply this: if in every poker session you played you were somehow able magically to quit at the halfway point, over time your performance would go through the roof.

It's rather a silly theory, but absurdly easy to prove or disprove. The reason it's silly is that you can never quit halfway through a session, for the simple reason that the fact that you're halfway through the session means that you didn't quit. It's easy to prove or disprove; just compare the size of your stack at the halfway point to the size of your stack at the end of the session.

Last night, I played 91 hands. The exact halfway point would be 45.5 hands, which is impossible, so let's round it up to 46. At the start of hand 46, I had $45,700 in chips. At the end of hand 91, I had $50,700 in chips. So for this particular session, the midpoint hypothesis fails; however, the true test of the hypothesis is when you look at the cumulative result over many sessions. I'll calculate it soon and report back to you.

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 91 hands and saw flop:
- 13 out of 17 times while in big blind (76%)
- 13 out of 17 times while in small blind (76%)
- 45 out of 57 times in other positions (78%)
- a total of 71 out of 91 (78%)
Pots won at showdown - 5 of 10 (50%)
Pots won without showdown - 13

delta: $10,700
balance: $3,196,272