sick of the drop in the bucket answer

[mike l.]

ok smart guys. so how many hands do i need to play online (4 tabling party 5-10 6 max) before i know

within say .3 bbs what my expected winrate is?

.7?

within .1 bbs?

im just blindly shooting for getting to 100k hands asap at this point and some people are telling me that's not even close to enough, that's just a drop in the bucket blah blah blah. i want some real true hard fast numbers!

[CMonkey]

See This thread

[Siegmund]

100K is a good round number to aim at.

Suppose your standard deviation is 15 BB/100.

Then you need 22,500 hands to get +/- 1BB/100
250,000 hands to get +/- 0.3 BB/100
2.2M hands to get +/- 0.1 BB/100.

That is for +/- 1 standard deviation (68% confidence)... 4 times as many hands if you want 95%.

[BradL]

Mike I respect most everything you have said on this forum, however all this winrate crap is just masterbation. Play poker. If your sole reason for playing online poker is to determine your "true" winrate then just stop. After 100k, 200k, 1mm hands you will either have the money or you wont. If you have the money, congratulations you are a winning player (i know you have been a winning player for 5 years prior). if you have been a losing player over 1mm hands then there wasnt much sense in figuring out your winrate anyway now was there?

Edit: This is not intended to discount the underlying statistics behind the game: I am a graduate student working with probability theory. I do think, however, that Mike's statement about blindly trying to reach 100,000 hands is alarming.

-Brad

[ThinkQuick]

[ QUOTE ]
See This thread

[/ QUOTE ]
great link

[MelchyBeau]

do you think your game will improve over those hands?
This makes me confused on how to figure out a winrate. The better you get the better your win rate will get. If you are looking for within .1bb, I think this will be skewed simply because you will get better after studying the game more.

Melch