Change in bankroll size for playing multiple tables

[bonanz]

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your StDev/hr will be greater, but only because you see more hands per hour. your StDev/100 hands should be the same.

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ding ding!

the key word is hourly and/or per hour.

if you ran 5 miles and could expect, on average, to see 5 bears on your jog. would you see more bears if you ran the distance in an hour or 2 hours? you'd see the same number of bears.

now if you ran it in an hour, youd see on average 5 bears per hour, where if you took 2 hours to run it, you'd see 2.5 bears per hour. [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

[BradL]

What people seem to be aluding to in their discussion of standard deviations increasing or decreasing is the idea of confidence limits, which are derived from the standard deviation and the number of trials, or in the case of poker, hands played. Confidence limits are used by casinos to determine expected win rate per n number of trials on table games and slots alike. Confidence limits are based on the Law of Large Numbers which states that: "In repeated independent trials of the same experiment, the actual proportion of occurences of an event eventually approaches its theoretical probability." - (Practical Casino Math by Robert C. Hannum and Anthony N. Cabot) Confidence limits are therefore the application of standard deviation over time or more accurately over number of trials. As the number of trials or hands played increases the distance between the upper and lower confidence limits become smaller and smaller. Essentially as you play more hands your expected win rate, 1BB per hour becomes closer to your actual win rate. What is important to note in stating that your expected win rate is 1 BB per hour is that it would be far more accurate to define the expected win rate by n number of hands than by time interval. As you play more hands per hour your actual win rate will more closely reflect your expected win rate as the confidence interval becomes smaller, however the standard deviation will remain the same.

I hope this has helped clear up any confusion. I tried to explain this as simply as possible and if it is not clear I can elaborate further.

-Brad