[SumZero]

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Does this have any practical use?

(Other than satisfying your curiosity?)

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it removes alot of the effects of variance, so you can have a better idea of how well you are playing, sooner

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This is in fact a good excercise. I did it after about 200 tournaments and figured out I didn't suck as badly as my results indicated (about 15 buy-in drop over 90 tournaments.... I was such a little bitch back then... I almost quit). It should net you some sort of mean value for your finish distribution, although it doesn't quite show the whole picture. As important as the hands that get called and shown is how often your opponents are dealt hands they can call with and how those holdings will fare against yours. That's much harder to quantify though.

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Well there is another drawback with this. You are ignoring the hands where you aren't covered. But those are significant hands (both in terms of bleeding chips and having leaks, earning chips through quality play, and getting lucky and unlucky in the short term).

Its true you can say that in order to win some tournament where you were covered as a 60/40 favorite twice and once as a 50/50 favorite that you only had an 18% chance to win the tournament given the way you played. But if you lost 10 pots for 3/4 of you stack where you were a 95% favorite you actually may not have been as lucky as the 18% suggests.

The bottom line is you always want to be studying your play, identifying leaks, thinking about past hands, and making correct decisions. If you do this, the results will take care of themselves in the long run. Either that or you'll be dead.