[sam h]

It depends on the question you want to ask. I think winrates are the hardest to make inferences about. You are definitely right that you need an ungodly amount of hands for this, making accurate assessments of individual hands in certain spots very difficult.

But there is another large problem that doesn't get nearly enough play around here. This is that when people talk about their long-term winrate, what they often fundamentally want to know is what their expected earn is going forward. And this is pretty much impossible to ascertain, because the data isn't reflecting the present, its speaking to the averaged past.

Fundamentally, the data is telling you about your aggregate winrate over the course of a long time, during which time it is not just likely but almost inevitable that game conditions, your resources (PT/PV), and your own ability have changed. Now if you're analyzing a 30K hand sample from the past few months, maybe these changes are not so large and the assumption that the "averaged past" is a good indicator of the present is not so problematic. But let's say you were only comfortable (in a statistical sense) with a sample of something like 500K hands. For many people, this probably brings them back to the days before playerview, when the games were somewhat different, and probably back into time periods when they themselves just weren't nearly as good.

On the bright side, this means that for players who have shown dramatic improvements in skill relative to changes in the difficulty of the games they play, it is likely that their winrate underrepresents their current expected earn.

On the other hand, it is very difficult to ascertain with real confidence what that earn is.