[PrayingMantis]

Irieguy,

I generally agree with the points you make about 500 SNGs "bragging posts", which are very biased and do not give any real picture about anything (although they have some psychological role, both to the posters and readers).

But I think there's some logical loop in the way you present it in your post, which, in a way, is unavoidable, and thus I don't mean to point out a "flaw" in _your_ particular reasoning or something.

The point is, that even if all of 2+2 registered posters are -9% ROI players, there would still be a pretty healthy chance that some of them are in fact "long term" winners too, and very few might even be actually "crushing" the games (that is - there IS the possibility). Naturally confidence intervals will be different, etc, but still, even considering the existence of "long-term winners", you are clearly not able to say with 100% confidence whether this game is +EV at all - in the sense of being beatable for players with a particular set of abilities.

Therefore, there will always be some amount of "belief" involved here, a "belief" in the fairness and beatability of the game which you cannot "prove" or "refute", even if you take your advice only from "long term" winners (that is, unless you have some direct access to the RNG itself and full results of ALL players, and not even then, in some cases). And in that sense, and in a deep way, a 10K games sample is not essentially different than a 500 games sample, and if you take the "biased" element, and put it into posts about "winning over 10K games" (of course, they are very very few in comparison), you get basically the same picture as with the common 500 games posts, i.e, you could write the same post about those people posting those (rare, to say the least) "bragging 10K-games winning post", and all your points would still be valid.

...

Reading the above, I'm not sure I made myself clear, so I'll rephrase it:

X (number of) "500-games bragging posts" aren't much helpful in determining whether SNGs are beatable (and for what ROI, if at all), as much as Y number (Y<X by a big margin) of "10K-games bragging posts" aren't helpful.

BTW, those "10K-games bragging posts" posters don't neccessarily need to actually POST their "bragging posts", since they are simply the most prominent posters, that everybody "knows" they are winning over a long term. But surely if you consider the possibility that this is actually a forum that discusses some -EV game, there's a good chance that there would still be those few long-term winning players, and obvisouly, they'll be the most prominent, and a "proof" that this -EV game is actually beatable, and for what "win-rate".