Re: Why is 10,000 hands too small?
As far as I know, variance in hold'em has always been derived empirically. With the advent of on-line poker and data base software tracking results over hundreds of thousands of hands is possible. Invariably one finds a standard deviation of around 15-20 BB/100 hands. One also finds win rate fluctuating 2 BB and more over 10,000 hands.
OK. So why is this? Well the vast majority of the time in hold'em you fold either preflop or on the flop and those hands don't contribute much to your results. A small number of hands determine your results so your effective sample size is much smaller.
For example, suppose a player has a true win rate of 2 BB/100 and this player loses 10 BB in one hand. For that particular hand the players win rate is -1000 BB/100. It takes a while to smooth out something like that.
Finally, consider that most authors state that nearly all profit comes from AA and KK and that most players break even or maybe make a slight profit on the rest of their hands. I think you can see that if a player gets AA and KK cracked two are three times or goes longer than usual without receiving these hands, that will have a large impact on win rate over many thousands of hands.
Paul
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