Hourly Rate Question

How many hours do you think is needed to play before getting a very good idea of your hourly rate? Some say around 1000 hours of play, what do you think?

PokerPrince

[MichaelD]

PokerPrince,

While I am not going by any formula, I personally believe a minimum of 2000 hours will give you a decent idea with 2500-3000 hours being more ideal as well as a bit more accurate.

This is nothing more than my opinon. Hope it helps.

Just some thoughts...

Michael D.

It takes alot longer than 1000 hours. Your computed hourly rate has a standard deviation of sigma/sqrt(n), where sigma is your true hourly standard deviation. Suppose sigma = 10 bb/hr and your true rate was 1 bb/hr. If you want a 95% proabability that your hourly rate will be accurate to within 10%, then 0.1 bets must be equal to 2 standard deviations or 2(10)/sqrt(n). So n = 40,000 hours. If you only wanted to be within 15%, this would drop to 17,777 hours. If your true hourly rate was .5 bb/hr, then you can multiply these number by 4. If it is 2 bb/hr, then it is 1/4 of these numbers. If you only played 1000 hours, then you would only be accurate to within .63 bets.

It is safe to assume that most players do not know their true hourly rate to within 15%.

In a recent post in general theory, I showed how to compute the confidence in your standard deviation. Note that it takes much less time to get an accurate estimate of standard deviation than it does hourly rate. 96.7% of the time your computed standard deviation will be within 15% of your true standard deviation after just 100 sessions.

[BruceZ]

BTW, for 3000 hours as someone suggested, you will be accurate to within .36 bets 95% of the time.