The grinder's merit badge

To be a successful poker player in the long run, you really have to be a grinder. What I mean by that is that you must be dogged in the pursuit of your goals, and not let anything set you back or get you down. You must be willing to accept the fact that you will not get rich quickly. With these characteristics in mind, I wondered if there were some way to prove a player is a grinder - a grinder's merit badge, in other words. I think I've found one. As you may know, one of the data sets I generate for each session is a list of the hand deltas, sorted in descending order by absolute value. Looking at this data from last night's session, which was a winning one, I saw something which I knew must be pretty rare for winning sessions - the top value in the list was a negative delta, i.e., an amount I had lost on a hand. I reasoned that only a grinder can have the top value in such a list be negative.

To see how rare such an occurrence is, I ran the numbers. Of the 557 sessions for which I have the requisite data for generating the lists, 381 were winning ones. Of those 381, only 25 meet the criterion.

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 73 hands and saw flop:
 - 8 out of 8 times while in big blind (100%)
 - 2 out of 10 times while in small blind (20%)
 - 34 out of 55 times in other positions (61%)
 - a total of 44 out of 73 (60%)
 Pots won at showdown - 4 of 8 (50%)
 Pots won without showdown - 5

delta: $11,656
cash game no limit hold'em balance: $5,116,160
balance: $7,473,113