Pool SimulatorBETA

How it works

Every reg in the pool has the same skill. Nobody has an edge over anybody else, so any gap between their results is luck.

The simulator seats the regs at 6-max tables, deals a block of 500 hands, then reshuffles the tables and deals again. It keeps going until every reg has played the hands you chose. Regs who have played the fewest hands get seats first, so everyone finishes within one block of each other.

In each block, every pair of players at a table gets one random result: the big blinds that moved between them. A reg's total is the sum of their results against everyone they sat with, so one reg's win is always another's loss. The results are sized so each reg's swings match the standard deviation you set.

Why the luckiest reg runs so well

Over 50,000 hands, luck alone moves a reg's win rate by about 4.5 bb/100 either way. Most regs land inside that. With 1,000 regs, though, someone lands more than three times that far from the true win rate, at about +14 bb/100, and someone else lands just as far below. Nothing in their results tells you it was luck.

Rivalries work the same way. If you pick the most lopsided matchup out of thousands, it looks like one reg owns the other, even though neither has an edge. In a big pool most regs barely meet, so the biggest rivalries show up best with 50 regs who play each other all the time.

Add a real winner

Turn on Real winner in the settings and one reg, picked at random, gets a real edge over everyone they play. Their line and dot show in gold, so you can press play and watch where a better player actually ends up.

With the default edge of 3 bb/100 in a pool of 1,000 regs, the real winner finishes first less than 1 time in 100 over 50,000 hands. They need about 1.2 million hands each before they finish first in half of pools. A big lead on a leaderboard says much less about skill than it looks.

Fish and rake

With fish and rake on, every player pays the rake you set, and each fish loses money to the regs it plays. This moves every reg's true win rate by the same amount but doesn't change their swings. If a fish loses 30 bb/100 at a table of five regs and the rake is 4.5 bb/100, each reg takes 5.1 bb/100 from it, so every reg wins 0.6 bb/100.

Try rake with no fish. The game then loses money overall, so every reg loses in the long run, yet the luckiest still look like strong winners.

What the simulation leaves out

• Every reg has the same standard deviation and plays the same stake.
• Each reg's swings are split into equal, independent results against each opponent. That gives every reg the right overall swings, but real head-to-head results may swing more or less.
• Rake is a fixed amount per 100 hands.