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Average Chip Stack - Most Meaningless Stat Ever.


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Hola, this is my first ever post, I meant to register to comment about something over a year ago but had problems signing up for some reason, and never had much to say that interested me ( dont read the forum, just the blog - and cardplayer vids occasionally - someone told me to watch yours for the dutch boyd moment lol but this interested me ).This is something so many people worry about - how they compare to the "average" chipstack, its total and utter junk.The average chipstack is calculated by the total number of chips in play divided by the players remaining, meaning the only thing it ever tells you is the number of players playing - it doesnt give you any meaningful information whatsoever using the mean average.A more useful stat would be the median stack - ie say its down to 99 players, the 50th largest stack would be the median and would actually tell you how your doing compared to the field although still relatively worthless compared to blind/ante ratio it would actually tell you something other than the number of players remaining.

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the median stack would be more decieving tha the average because it can mislead you. If the median could be way smaller or larger than the average and would confuse you about were you stand with respect to the rest of the feild. I think the average stack would be a much more useful stat if if it was given with the standard deviation.oh and welcome :club:

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I'll kick a field goal betwen the two of you. Median stack is a slightly better number to know, if you had your choice between the two. When you are looking to climb into the money median stack tells you how far you have to climb to get into the top half of the remaining runners. You can then compare that stack to the projected bubble stack and know how aggressive or passive you need to be. Average stack is the more deceiving of the two. Look at the extreme situation: 50 players left out of 250, 27 positions pay, initial stack was 2000, so average stack is 10,000. You have 2000. If the big stack has 497000 chips and everyone else has 20, isnt knowing the median is 20 more important than knowing the average is 10,000?However, except for a rebuy now and then, chip distribution is almost always uniform enough that average and median arent very far apart.

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I agree with the OP. The median would be nice to know, as there are many times where the Average is pulled up because of a monster stack, which tends to happen more often then not nowadays. Adding the median would be nice because alot of players just look at the average, and if the average is pulled up, they will start panicking, when they might be right around the median and still have a nice stack compared to the blinds.

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- someone told me to watch yours for the dutch boyd moment lol but this interested me ).
If you are talking about the video where Boyd barged in Matusow's interview its on Poker Wire.
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  • 2 weeks later...
I'll kick a field goal betwen the two of you. Median stack is a slightly better number to know, if you had your choice between the two. When you are looking to climb into the money median stack tells you how far you have to climb to get into the top half of the remaining runners. You can then compare that stack to the projected bubble stack and know how aggressive or passive you need to be. Average stack is the more deceiving of the two. Look at the extreme situation: 50 players left out of 250, 27 positions pay, initial stack was 2000, so average stack is 10,000. You have 2000. If the big stack has 497000 chips and everyone else has 20, isnt knowing the median is 20 more important than knowing the average is 10,000?However, except for a rebuy now and then, chip distribution is almost always uniform enough that average and median arent very far apart.
well the median stack is easily identified by dividing the numbers of players left by 2 and looking at his stack
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