[BruceZ]

[ QUOTE ]
Your adjusted SD is determined by taking your hourly SD (or your per 100 hand SD as most online players calculate it) and dividing it by the square root of the number of hours (100 hand units) played.

Example:

You have a SD of $ 1,000 per 100 hands.

You go on to play 10,000 hands over the next month and decide to recalculate your SD.

There are one hundred 100-hand-units in 10,000 [hands].

The square root of 100 is 10.

Your $ 1,000 per-100-hand SD can now be adjusted (lowered) to $ 100 per 100 hands.

The bad news is that you'll need to play 30,000 more hands to cut the new figure in half and 150,000 more hands to cut THAT figure in half.

The good news is that with online play you are able to do in a year what most old-timers were unable to do in a lifetime.

If you play 2 games at once and see 50 hands/hr/game (100 hands/hr) you'll see 1,000 hands in a 10 hour day.

It would take a week for most live players to play 1,000 hands; if you play 4 games at once you can equal 2 of his weeks in a day - or one of his years in a month.

Three years of online poker equals more hands than most live players see in a lifetime; 5 yrs of fulltime online play is more poker than ANY live player ever saw.

The world it is a'changin.

[/ QUOTE ]

When the OP said:

[ QUOTE ]
Let's say I know the standard deviation of my win rate. As I play more hands the SD number may change. This might be due to game conditions or my play changing. However, even if we assume that these variables are consistent my SD should 'settle down' over time, coming closer and closer to the true figure. How do I estimate how close to this 'true figure' my current SD is? In effect what is the SD of my SD?


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He was really asking about the accuracy of the computed standard deviation of his winnings for say 100 hands, not the standard deviation of his win rate as he wrote in his first sentence. The standard deviation of the win rate, or standard error of the win rate (SE) is a measure of the accuracy of the computed win rate, and it decreases toward 0 the longer you play as your win rate becomes known more accurately, and it is equal to SD/sqrt(N), where N is the number of hands/100, and SD is the true standard deviation for 100 hands. It is the SE which you are discussing in your post. The true value of the SD doesn't change if we assume that conditions stay the same. Our estimate of the SD becomes more accurate. He wants to know about the accuracy of the SD estimate, which actually introduces another standard error, the SE of the computed standard deviation.