Contradeltas

The title of this post borrows from an investing concept I'm passingly familiar with. Fidelity Investments has a well-known mutual fund named Contrafund whose goal is to make contrarian investments; that is, investments which run in the opposite direction the market is current moving. I decided it would be interesting to apply a similar concept to poker session deltas. Up to now, I've only concerned myself with the overall delta of each session; a win was a win, and a loss was a loss. However, now I'm realizing that some wins are essentially losses, and some losses are essentially wins. One way to distinguish between a winning win and a losing win, or between a losing loss and a winning loss, is to use contradeltas. You heard this term here first, folks, and I'm not charging a red cent for it :-) A contradelta is the sum of the deltas going in the opposite direction of your session delta. In a winning session, the contradelta is the sum of all your losing deltas; in a losing session, the contradelta is the sum of all your winning deltas.

Last night, I had a winning session, but it was essentially a losing win. My contradelta was a whopping $-96,783. I only have the data necessary for calculating contradeltas for 162 of the 689 sessions I've recorded, so I don't know where this contradelta stacks up all time. In the 162 I have the data for, 124 were winning sessions; of these 124, last night's contradelta clocks in at number 14. That is to say, there are only 13 sessions in which I've lost more chips in my losing deltas while still managing to have a winning session.

Contradeltas can make you feel better about a loss, but I don't think they can actually make you feel worse about a win; a win is a win, after all!

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 100 hands and saw flop:
 - 6 out of 14 times while in big blind (42%)
 - 7 out of 14 times while in small blind (50%)
 - 39 out of 72 times in other positions (54%)
 - a total of 52 out of 100 (52%)
 Pots won at showdown - 5 of 17 (29%)
 Pots won without showdown - 4

delta: $9,901
balance: $4,461,598