# of Hours or # of hands?

[WannaGoPro]

When determining if you are a winning player over the long term do you calculate the # of hands played or # of hours played?

For example lets take 2 different players, PLayer A and Player B.

Player A plays 40 hours per week playing only 1 table.
Player B plays 40 hours per week playing 4 tables at a time.

Now for arguments sake lets say that 1000 hours is the magic number to determine if you are a long term winning player at any given limit.

Player A would have to play 25 weeks to prove that he is a winning player.
Would Player B only have to play for 6.5 weeks to prove he is a winning player? Or would he still have to play for 25 weeks but have played 4x the amount of hands?

Commments?

[moondogg]

Why would the hours matter?
Suppose one night you have a fast dealer and he deals you 50 hands/hour for 100 hands, and the next night a slow dealer deals you 10 hands/hour for 100 hands. In the end, 100 hands is 100 hands, it just took you longer to get there.

The only difference, IMHO, is the change in one's ability to focus and concentrate when you get into online and multitabling. This factor itself can impact your winrate.

However, if you log 10 hours playing poker but only play 20 hands in that time, it don't mean @%#$.

The whole BB/hour winrate idea is based on a general assumption of the number of hands that will be played in an hour (In a B&M casino, it's a hell of a lot easier to track your hours and just estimate the number of hands played). If you get a faster/slower dealer, faster/slower players, if you switch from B&M to online, or you switch from one online table to four, the use of BB/hour as an indicator of qualitative(sp?) success begins to come apart. Hence the increased use of BB/100 (big bets per 100 hands played).

If you are trying to figure out whether you can make enough per week to pay the bills if you play for a certain amount of hours, then your BB/hour critical because time is money. However, if you are trying to determine if you have won enough, consistently enough for enough time in order to state "I am a winning player" , the hours are damn-near meaningless (IMHO), and number of hands is critical.

An analysis of your variance and standard deviation is based on the number of trials (number of hands played), and how long each trial took is pretty irrelevent for that purpose.

[tubbyspencer]

The number of hands played.