New Leaderboards and Champion's Club
Today we are launching a new APT Leaderboards and "Champion's Club" ranking system. Please bear with us as we work out the bugs, and as always let us know what you think.
I wanted to answer a few common questions about how the ranking are computed.
How often are the leaderboards updated?
The Champion's Club is updated on the first day of every month. All other leaderboards are updated once per day, at 12AM Eastern (New York) time.
Why are my winnings shown in the leaderboard different from the numbers on the "My Reports" or "My Trophies" pages?
There are many reasons this can happen. Some of these include:
- Some leaderboard views only show results from when you played at the Hardest level, whereas you may be looking at your reports for all levels.
- The leaderboards are very restrictive about what sessions are included. Incomplete tournaments are thrown out, any sessions where you peeked at your opponent's cards, etc. This is to prevent cheating in the leaderboards. Whereas your reports are for your eyes only, and it's up to you if you want to peek at your opponent's cards -- we'll still include those sessions in your reports.
- Additionally, deleted sessions are removed from your reports, but will continue to affect your leaderboard rankings (again, to prevent cheating by deleting losing sessions).
- Finally, ROI (return on investment, for tournaments) is computed differently in the leaderboards. See next question.
How is ROI (return on investment) computed?
On your "My Reports" and "My Trophies" pages, it is computed the traditional way (total net winnings divided by total cost of buyins).
In the leaderboards, we take your ROI for each tournament individually, and then average them all out. While it may not be obvious why that's important, it presents a more fair view of what user really has the best ROI. For example, without this protection, a user could play 999 tournaments, set the buyin at $10, lose all of them, and then play one tournament, set the buyin at $10,000, win it, and show a huge ROI, while only cashing in 1 out of 1000 tournaments.
What is the "Decay" factor mentioned on some of the leaderboards?
For all 180-day leaderboard views, there is a "decay" factor added in, that makes your most recent results matter more than old results. For the mathematically curious, it is computed like this:
DECAY_FACTOR = (Number of Days Old) / 180
For example, for your 9-max ranking, poker hands that you played 90 days ago, would only "count" half as much towards your ranking, compared to hands you play today.
How is the "Champion's Club" calculated?
There are currently 12 individual leaderboards:
- Nine-max cash
- Six-max cash
- Heads-Up Cash
- Multi-Table Tournaments
- Final Table Trainer
- Nine-max Sit-N-Go
- Heads-Up Sit-N-Go
- What's the Nuts?
- The Upper Hand
- Live Tournaments
- Weekly Challenges
- Beat the Pro Challenge
The Champions Club is computed using your position in the leaderboard for your 10 best games (of the 12 games above).
For each of the individual leaderboards, only the first leaderboard "View" shown is considered. For example, for 9-max cash, the View considered is "Best BB/100, KGB's Dungeon". For MTTs, it is "Best ROI at Hardest Level". For What's the Nuts, it is "Accuracy divided by Average time per correct answer".
Only the Last 30 Days are considered when computing the Champion's Club rankings.
You are awarded points based on your position in the top 100 players for each leaderboard. First place earns 10,000 points. Second Place earns 9,900 points, Third Place earns 9,800 points, and so on. 100th place earns 100 points.
Since up to 10 leaderboards are considered, the maximum amount anyone could get would be 100,000 points.
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Comments
Great idea however, what are the chances of being able to review the top winners sessions to help us mere mortals learn how they are doing it?
I will give that some thought, boxjump, but I don't think it will be possible. Even if I were to anonymize it, I think many members would object to their private database being shared with the community.
On the decay factor: The way it appears to be written [ Number of Days Old / 180], a game played 180 days ago (i.e. 180 days old) would have a higher rating [ 180 days old / 180] rather than a lower rating. I am wondering if the formula is actually [ (180-Number of days old)/180 ]. That way a game played 180 days ago would have a value of close to -0-.
Very observant! I was actually saying that's how much it would decay, so that results 180 days old would be 180/180 =100% decayed. But you're right that it's probably more intuitive to write it your way.
Hey, Steve, regarding Boxjump's request, I will try to post a hand a day for a few days from KGB Dungeon, as leader of the pack in KGB dungeon today, as of the last 180 days, I am always happy to help out a mere mortal. I can step down from these dizzying heights long time enough to do that. It may be on Monday because my computer crapped out and I am working from an iPad until then.
I won't object to you passing out any of my hand histories, but if you have time to look over the hands and delete those hands and those sessions where I pull some real boners that leave me looking like even less than a mere mortal and like a Neanderthal or Homo Erectus.
Plus, regarding status in the community, I guess I should report that I began playing cash games at Ignition and Betonline and a few months ago and that I have not yet clearly beaten the 01-02 at betonline or the 02-05 at betonline or the 02-05 at Ignition, Zone or cash games. I play mostly Zone.
I recently moved up to 05-10 and some 25-50 and I have not yet a proven winner but I am doing much better at those stakes and I am a little ahead. I think I am doing better because I take it more seriously.
I do use some moves that I learned playing at ATP with good effect. One of those being the rebluff and playing passively against aggressive players, until the river, sometimes going for the check raise on the river.
I learned some things about reads at ATP, and I use that too.
I think there are a lot of similarities between the bot villains at ATP and the zone villains at Ignition.
Steve, since your discretion, or something, has prevented you from disclosing how I whined to you and Allen that the cards were, rigged at ATP about a year or so ago, back before I started pulling ahead--well, I just told that myself.
I told Allen a few times that ATP might save me a whole lot of money because I was not going to play in cash games until I proved myself a winner at this site--it may have looked to Allen and Steve like I would never play for cash if I stuck to my word. I wondered myself but somewhere I always believed I could win here and at the cash games.
It is a great game, a really fun game and I love playing cards. I love it when I am waiting for that opening and then I see it. I don't love it at all when I am forcing that opening. I love it when I am fully aware of what can go wrong. I don't love it when I hold a nut flush and get blindsided by a full house that I didn't see when i bet out on the river, especially not when I called an all in. I might have called that all in anyway. The part I don't like is not knowing it might happen.
One other comment for the mere mortals--I have not gone back over as many of my hands as I would have liked to, but I think I got great benefit from going back over the sessions I did go back over. That is where I learned things. That is when the stuff I had read in books started to mean something.
I am planning on learning sit and go' next here at ATP.
And what I want Steve to do, when he can, is to set it up where we can set certain board cards or all board cards.
JaxCrax
What is the rake at .02/.05 Ignition Zone? I bet it'd be hard to beat KGB with a stupid vacuum cleaner sucking ___% out of each pot, too.
Your comment leads me to think ATP should offer the rake as an option, or as built in and required.
Regarding the rake at Ignition, I know two things about the rake: (1) it is high, and (2) the rake is not why I did not beat 02-05. The reasons I was not beating 02/05 was that I was playing with a lack of discipline that is apparently much easier for me to address when the stakes get a little higher. It's almost like my results at ATP--the lower the stakes, the worse I do.
I told myself I was going to beat 01/02 at betonline and 02/05 at Ignition before I moved up. But because the results of my forays into 05/10 were so much better than my play at the bottom levels, I have moved up without beating the bottom levels. I am more disciplined.
My record at 02/05 may not appear to be much of a testimony to the value of ATP. That is not how I look at it. I have trouble with discipline at the lowest ATP tables to this day.
As far as how I have benefitted from ATP, I think I see that in the amount of my losses at 01/02 and 02/05. I was up and down, but over 2 months I made two $25 deposits at Ignition, and now it is at $62 with all of the gain from 05/10. When I made that second deposit, it went below $20 when I started playing 05/10. I made one $50 deposit at betonline and my balance is between $20 and $30. I don't play betonline as much because on this computer I am playing on right now, I don't have poker tracker or Hold'em manager. And because you have to wait on a table.
At ATP I became acquainted with variance, which was way wider than I expected it to be. In fact, I was shocked.
I see the exact same variance at ignition and betonline. When I believed something was really funny and I asked Steve about it, he told me that he runs the same randomization software used by sites where you play for money.
I didn't think he was lying to me, but I wasn't convinced, I am convinced now.
Seeing that first at ATP and being ready for it has saved me a lot of money,
My benefit from ATP to this point is in money saved. Years ago I played 5 card draw and I never tilted. I thought I couldn't tilt.
I tilted major on ATP badly. It even scared me of myself. There was the night in--the name of the table has "alley" in it. I lost 5 or 6 buying, went crazy and lost a bunch more. Then I calmed myself down and said I was gonna win it all back. I ran it up to $59,000, which comes to about 14 buyins.
Next thing I knew I was back at zero.
It was crazy.
I was gonna go through that. That was destined. As it was, I went through it on ATP and saved a whole lot of money.
I don't think I am immune from going crazy. But it is true that my craziness has been limited so far, and I plan to keep it that way.
A reduction of negative results impacts the bottom line to the same degree that positive results impact the bottom line. I have not clearly beat 02/05 but my losses are not material, meaning that they are so small they don't much matter.
I have also noticed things about my play on ATP that seem to cross over--here is an example:
I noticed at ATP there was a definite pattern I finally caught on to. I would log in to ATP telling myself I would play 100 hands. There was this pattern of my jumping out of the starting gate and doubling the buy in by the time I had 25 or so hands. Over the next 75 or so hands, I would slowly lose everything I had won.
That happened just way too many times. I believed it was some kind of inadvertent subconscious programming,
So I started quitting after I doubled my buy in. My overall results improved.
I saw the same thing with the 100 hands happening at ignition. A lot of people will thing this is stupid, but so what? When I double my buy in at ignition, I log out. I go out in the backyard or do something for a few minutes and log back in. I buy in for the minimum because I want to be ready to go all in or call an all in at the drop of a hat.
It took me months to identify and to address this pattern at ATP.
I still come to ATP regularly. For me, it is a pretty good measure of how I am playing on a particular day. If I come to ATP and get wiped out, I play at Ignition anyway. But after I lose one buy in, it's easier to quit because of the evidence I have from ATP that says, "Today is not your day."
The scary thing about variance is that the curve doesn't necessarily smooth out as much as you'd like as you increase the scale.
In other words, those "bad days" can happen, but "bad weeks" with similar downward slope happen, as do "bad months." Yes, it might happen a little less frequently, but it happens, inevitably, given time.
So, imagine you're looking at a graph (bankroll vs. time) and zooming out, past the margins and ultimately WAY out. THAT graph is not terribly different, unless you get way, way out -- like, orders of magnitude further out.
So, yes, it's jagged, with upswings and downswings that are, in reality, nothing more than a clump of observable results that only becomes apparent after the fact -- we assign the "idea" of it being an upswing/downswing, but it really depends on what "zoom level" you are observing from. A swing that occurs for a day would get "rounded off" in the graph of the year. But the graph of the year would have a distribution of larger swings that "look" like, maybe, the weekly graph, but just a little "mellower."
So it should really be a prerequisite for a serious player: "look at the negative streak in this graph. This WILL be your life at some point, probably sooner than you would think and for longer than you expect, and it will have nothing to do with how in control you are. How do you think you'll feel? Can you handle this?"
I don't have a rating in Beat the Pro Challenge because it says I haven't taken Five challenges. Reality is I've taken every challenge. So degrading these just won't work. New ones aren't posted frequently enough. This needs to be something like an average of your best 5 or 10 hardest challenges or something like that.
That's a good suggestion because it is only calculated over a 180 day period (and you took many of yours a long time ago). We'll figure something out to fix that.
Wow, I didn't even think of that. I'll change it this week so that it always considers your all-time BTP challenges taken (no decay). Thanks HugoX.
We're is the learderbord gone?
You can find it on the "Trophies" tab now. Or here's a link:
https://www.advancedpokertraining.com/poker/leaderboards.php
By the way, as of February, only your Last 30 Days of results are included in the Champion's Club rankings, to make it fair for new members. Previously, we were using "180 days with decay" to compute the rankings each month.
Steve,
I recently placed 6th in a live APT tournament and have played five tournaments, yet I don't show up on the leader board. Any ideas why?
You do show up in the "Last 30 Days" leaderboard -- 119th place currently. At the moment, you have no winnings yet. The tournament in which you placed 7th (last Friday) only paid 6 places.
Steve
Update -- it looks like there is something wrong with the leaderboards for live tournaments. I'm working on it now.
Thanks,
Steve
btw, this is fixed now.
There are different levels of the game. How do I know the number one did not play the EASY level and got to the top. And I keep playing the HARD level and never get ranked high ?...
I do not think anyone will object, they will sooner or later drop from the top spot and be interested in top spots games. We all play anonymous anyway.... Even if they object, this is what the majority and the site want...
Don't worry - your hard play isn't being compared with someone else's easy play (unless you choose that option). Only the hardest level is used for Champion's Club, and the default view for all the leaderboards only uses the hardest level unless you specifically choose the option for all levels to be included. Please see https://www.advancedpokertraining.com/poker/forum/discussion/176/new-leaderboards-and-champions-club for more info on the calculations.
As far as showing other people's play, we aren't going to do that without permission. I consider the hand data of our members their private information and even if the majority would love that (which I agree with), I don't think it is appropriate for me to make that call for everyone. I get emails all the time of people worried about their hand data being public. One possible option would be to allow our members to opt in to sharing all their hands. I imagine that like you some would love this - but I'd only do it on an opt in basis, not opt out. What I picture would be where if a member had opted in to sharing their hands, other members would be able to see a read-only version of their saved hands. This would enable searching to see how they played certain hands, etc. I think that would be a pretty cool feature (and helpful from a training perspective). Thoughts on that?
Anything, why not try.... why would anyone disapprove, even best players can benefit, we are all using fake names anyway.
Nobody owns the top spots, they all drop, some never make it again.
That's when they need it.
Looking for 10 min 5 interested to make the effort. Could be fun and free is good too.
Contact me: highfivepoker@gmail
Im primarily a cash player although I did finish 1st once in the mtt bot category. @lizh @jazzyone