A quick question about statistics...

[cold_cash]

I recently downloaded PokerTracker and it seems like since then I've become increasingly concerned about my statistics.

I've only got about 6000 hands in my database so far, so I've been reluctant to draw any conclusions as of yet, but one thing that has me a litte puzzled is my VPIP.

It seems that over the course of those 6000 hands I've been ridiculously tight, yet my winrate is unsustainably high. I'm not complaining, mind you, I'm just trying to figure this out. I don't feel like I'm playing any tighter than I have in the past, but for all I know I may have ALWAYS been too tight. I can't help but think that even though my winrate is good, it might be even better if I loosened up some. I honestly don't know where I would do that though.

The sample size is tiny, so I'm wondering if I should draw any conclusions from this at all, or just relax and keep playing. If that's the case, how many hands are needed before I can use this as an accurate guage? I don't want to go overboard with this stuff, but it also seems like I should be able to use this information in some way before I have 100,000 hands to go off of.

If this question requires a "Dude, those 6000 hands are a drop in the bucket so shut your pie-hole" response, feel free to let me have it.

[MaxPower]

Your VP$IP is probably estimated fairly accurately by 6000 hands, but your win rate is estimated very poorly.

[cold_cash]

So if my VPIP is around 12% I'm justified to raise my eyebrow a little (or a lot)?

[sfer]

Looks like you need to hang around more after the flop to suck-out. /images/graemlins/tongue.gif

[MaxPower]

I couldn't tell you exactly what your confidence interval is, but I would take that number to be an accurate estimate. I have pretty much the same VP$IP for every month in my PT database and most of those months have around 6000 hands. So, I would assume that 6000 hands is large enough sample to measure VP$IP.

Whether 12% is too low is another question. It depends on the game, but my guess is that you can play a few more hands. Mine is around 18-19 percent for Party 3/6.

I think the pre-flop raise statistic is a much more important thing to look at.

[cold_cash]

So far my pre-flop raise percentage is 6.6%.

[J.R.]

Work on increasing that by about 50%.

[Octopus]

If you assume that every hand is equally likely to have money voluntarily put in, then 6,000 hands is enough to get the standard deviation of the estimate to about .5%. If we assume that every 10 hands the correct representative unit, then 6,000 hands will get you to about 1.45%. The true standard deviation is somewhere between those numbers.

In any case, you do not need more than a few thousand hands to get a reasonable idea of where you stand.

(To get these numbers, I assumed a binomial distribution. This is not strictly correct, but should be more than close enough, particluarly for the 10 hands version.)

[The4thFilm]

numbers please