prob question

[NYplayer]

poker hands are not distrubted normally so standard deviations are not consistent. for example if you have a stdev of 15 bb/100 but get aces twice and a few other big hands your stdev will be higher for that 100.

anyway, keeping this in mind. what is the likelyhood for a break even player to go 1600 hands losing 12 bb/100?

[AaronBrown]

Although individual hands do not have a Normal distribution, the sum of many hands is pretty close. This is a general theorem in statistics (the Central Limit Theorem) as long as the individual trials are independent and have finite variance.

Poker hands are not independent. If you reveal a weak hand in showdown, people will play you for bluffing more in the future. If you check raise, people will play you for stronger hands when you check. Also, play quality goes up and down over time.

Still, probability statements based on the Normal distribution are pretty reliable, at least if you're talking about likely events (don't use it to compute the chance of a player going 10 standard deviations above his average).

With a standard deviation of 15 BB per 100 hands, the standard deviation should be about 60 BB per 1600 hands. Losing 192 BB over that period is a -3.2 standard deviation event. That's not impossible, but there's a very strong suggestion that either the player is not breakeven or the standard deviation is larger than 15 BB/100.