Sample · one session, as the player receives it
Your session closed fifty dollars up. Six dollars and sixty-nine cents of that was yours.
A real session, written for a VIP who runs a business — the kind of player who reads a quarter's numbers for a living and will read these the same way.
Your result
+$50.01
By EV
+$6.69
Decisions that mattered
2
You finished the session fifty dollars up. Almost all of it came from one hand in which you held the best starting cards in the deck and the board obliged. The two decisions you genuinely had to make happened seven minutes apart, and between them they were worth seven dollars.
That is not a criticism of the session. It is the reason the session is worth half an hour of your attention rather than a glance at the balance.
Results and the quality of the decisions behind them are kept in different books.Two books
You already know this from the other table. A quarter is carried by one deal nobody at the firm controlled, and the team is appraised on it afterwards. The useful question — what the quarter would have looked like without that deal — is asked far less often, because the answer sits in a book nobody keeps.
Bessemer Venture Partners keeps it, and publishes it. On its own website the firm maintains a page it calls the Anti‑Portfolio: the companies it declined to back. Apple. Google. eBay. Intel. PayPal. Tesla. Airbnb. Zoom. The entry on FedEx records seven separate refusals.
Without that page the firm would look better. With it, the firm can actually be read. The portfolio records how things turned out; the anti-portfolio records how they were decided. Almost everyone keeps the first. Only the second teaches anything.
Your session has both books too. Here is what is in each.
Hand 01 · the hand that paid
A♠A♦
You open $2 · the button raises to $8 · you re-raise to $22
the button moves all-in for $227.96 · you call $99.46 — $121.46 in
He turns over K♥K♦
Across all 1,712,304 ways the remaining board can fall, aces beat kings 81.71% of the time and split another 0.46%. The hand was dealt out twice; both boards were yours.
+$118.46 · worth $75.14 in expectation · the remaining $43 came from the deck
Three decisions in that hand, all three correct — and not one of them difficult. Holding the best pair in the deck against a re-raise, there is nothing to work out. The money was real; the thinking was not. The thinking had happened seven minutes earlier.
Hand 02 · the first real decision
A♦J♥ — Q♥7♦Q♠4♦8♦
You call $1.30 from the big blind · call $1.50 on the flop · the turn checks through
He bets $3.50 into $8.10 · you raise to $18.83 · he calls with A♥7♠
The price is against you, and plainly so. You put $18.83 at risk to win $11.60, which requires him to fold more than six times in ten. He puts in $15.33 to win $30.43 and needs to be right only one time in three.
It is still the right raise. The ace of diamonds in your own hand removes a large share of the aces and diamond flushes he would continue with — precisely the hands that beat you here. Against an opponent opening only strong hands, this raise is correct roughly one time in three.
−$22.63 · correct decision
Hand 03 · the second, seventy-two seconds later
A♦Q♦ — A♣Q♥5♠J♣
You open $2 · both blinds call · you bet $1.98 on the flop, the small blind calls
You bet $7.47 on the turn · he raises to $28 · you call $20.53
Calling $20.53 into $45.43 requires you to be right 31.1% of the time. The set of hands that raises that card holds 181 combinations; by our count 154 of them are behind you — 121 still needing a card to arrive, 23 already ahead. Two pair holds up about three times in four.
+$29.48 · correct decision
The session, in both books. The aces returned $118.46. The other 305 hands came to roughly −$75. The evening closed at +$50.01.
In the results book it was a good session. In the decisions book it was seven dollars and one arguable river raise — and both of those decisions were yours, which the fifty dollars was not.
The first book is the pleasant one to be judged by. The second is the only one you can work from.
Prepared for you by your room · every figure computed from your own hand histories
Note from Tableside — not part of the piece
Three of the figures above can be checked independently. 81.71% is an enumeration of all 1,712,304 boards and any equity calculator returns it. Six times in ten is $18.83 against $11.60, on paper. 154 of 181 combinations is the one figure resting on an assumption about the opponent's range; the composition is printed class by class in the working file, with the dead cards of that street and no others.
Everything else is an exact count from the hand history and reconciles with the pot totals in the room's own database to the cent.