How many hands at Limit Poker do you need in a Poker Tracker...

...Database to reliably be able to know your win rate? (BB/100)

How many hands do you need to even out the rushes and cold streaks to know how much you ACTUALLY are making (or losing)?

I'm a Limit player, not NL.
I have a DB with 13K hands and even this many doesn't seem enough at all to draw
any real conclusions from...(but then again, I just got PT 2 days ago, so I have no idea)

Thanks,

[jaxUp]

An old post from Homer

Use bisonbison's formulas to go by hands rather than hours. You can play around with the numbers and see how it changes WRT # of hands played.

[GuyOnTilt]

You will never know your true LHE wr to within any reasonable range. I made a post a while back in MHS I'll try to find.

GoT

[hobbsmann]

copy of that post:

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GoT did some calculations and concluded that it's possible for a "true" 1.8/100 winner to win like 3+bb/100 or .5ish bb/100. Combine this with the fact that players are bound to change their play from the beginning of a meaningful stretch of hand to the end, and obsessing over your bb/100 rate is little more than an act in futility.
-James

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Come on. This way oversimplifies things. Just because it's possible for a 1.8 player to run at 3.0 or 0.5 doesn't mean it's likely. As the number of hands increases the level of confidence in the BB/100 number undoubtedly increases, but that does NOT mean that the number is meaningless after 25k or 50k or 100k.

In other words, to paraphrase Peter_Rus' idea, is it possible that someone running at 2BB/100 after 50,000 hands is really a losing player? Yes, possible. Is it likely? No. Stated another way, just because something isn't "statistically significant" doesn't mean it's meaningless.


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Eh, I'm getting questions now about this so I figured I'd specify. I ran 100 samples of 100k hands each for a 1.80 wr, 16.90 sd player (or 100 different players with the exact same true winrate and sd under the circumstances). Note this test would assume winrate is constant per 100 hands, i.e. no changing game conditions, no tilting, etc. Out of the 100, the highest wr was 3.47 and the lowest was 0.42, with the total wr over the 10 million hands being 1.95, meaning the player(s) was/were running hot for these 10M hands, and not just by a little, yet still one of these samples was as low as 0.42 bb/100.

On the subject of sample size, obviously 100 trials is far too few to come to any reliable conclusions. But these results made me think of variance and the long run in LHE quite differently. If two people playing the same game were to present to me their last 100k hands and one was earning 0.5 bb/100 and the other was earning 3.5 bb/100, who would I think was the better player? Obv, the 3.5 guy. But how much doubt would there be in my mind as to whether he was better or not? Apparently there should be room for some. Winrates just do not converge NECESSARILY until millions and millions of hands. For some they will, sure. Some of us will run close to our true earn for our lifetimes and will rarely or never venture to the upper amplitude of our SD. Others will run hotter than our true earn lifetime; some a little and some A LOT. Same goes with running cold. Some of us will find the very outer bounds of what our SD is capable of, and others won't even get close.

So what determines who among us will get rich and who stays stagnant or drops down? Better players will have a better chance at success of course, and success on a greater scale. But even a WCP could very conceivably end up having to drop down to lower limits while a mediocre player may rise to the big games, maybe never even realizing they're as good as they truly are. It might not even be a stretch to say this HAS happened.

So poker skills being equal, what determines who becomes and millionaire and who keeps playing 15/30? I don't know. QM? Sure. Maybe God DOES play dice with poker, I don't know. What I do know is that this (along with continuing to learn and appreciate Zen philosophies) has helped me come to realize that results, even on an extremely broad or lengthy scale, should be meaningless to me. And I don't mean meaningless in the sense of how I view the game now. I mean in the sense of how I feel I should STRIVE to view the game. We as a group have trained ourselves to not care about 200 bet swings, about 20k hand down periods. None of that comes naturally of course, but as we learned more and more about the nature of LHE we came to accept those things as just part of the package and we learned to deal with it. In the same way, I'm attempting to continually make myself immune to results, period. Not just short-term, but long-term as well. I want to approach this game theoretically and conceptually, without the hint of any wins or losses clouding my judgement. Ridding my conscious from any and all results, period; that is the goal. I'm not there yet by a long shot, but given what I think I know about this game and the philosophy and approach I feel is best for me, my goal is to be constantly progressing toward that state.

GoT

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I have a DB with 13K hands . . . (I just got PT 2 days ago)

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You've played 13,000 hands in TWO DAYS!?

Dude, get some sleep.

[hobbsmann]

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I have a DB with 13K hands . . . (I just got PT 2 days ago)

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You've played 13,000 hands in TWO DAYS!?

Dude, get some sleep.

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you CAN import hands you played when you DIDN'T have PT.

[oxymoron]

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I have a DB with 13K hands . . . (I just got PT 2 days ago)

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You've played 13,000 hands in TWO DAYS!?

Dude, get some sleep.

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you CAN import hands you played when you DIDN'T have PT.

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Hahahahahhahahaha

And GoT's post is awesome.

hey,

I actually imported the hands that I played over a week or 2 prior time period to "My First PT Database" lol

I won like $400. playing $2/4 over that time, but in the DB it had my results as winning only $100. or so...I don't understand this...

And to comment on the 13K hands thing, there were a lot of times during that time I can
remember in which I was 80% 85% or even 95% to win BIG pots with 1 card to come Heads Up...($60 to even $75 pots - which are big pots at $2/4 Limit...) and the idiot
caught his "lucky" card to win...NOW, if just 2 or 3 of these pots where
my opponent got really lucky went my way in those 13K hands, that would double or triple my BB/100 during that time!!!
So, just based on this common sense observation, isn't 13K hands pretty much meaningless???

I know there is no "absolute" way to know your exact WR, but how many hands do you need to be
90% or so confident to know a decent/usefull "range" on how much you make per hour or 100 hands...???
(I'm not a "Math guy", so pls. don't say go to the Homer equations/calculations b/c
I didn't understand really much of it, although I'm sure it's brilliant lol).

?
Lost PokerTracker User needs help! And where the heck else do I find what all the other stuff in PokerTracker means/how to actually use/apply
all the info. in my DataBases to use to help me vanquish my foes?

Thanks in advance for any replies brother 2 +ers.

[WordWhiz]

You don't need to be a math guy; just plug Homer's formula into Excel and let it do the math for you. But here's the easy version for you:

If you made $400 (or 100 BB) over 13k hands, that's .77 BB/100. Assuming a standard deviation of about 19 (typical), I can say with 95% confidence that your true win rate is somewhere between -2.5 and 4 BB/100. If you only want 1 sigma (66% confidence), then it's -.8 and 2.36.

In other words, yeah, 13k hands is pretty useless.

[jba]

"NOW, if just 2 or 3 of these pots where
my opponent got really lucky went my way in those 13K hands, that would double or triple my BB/100 during that time!!!
So, just based on this common sense observation, isn't 13K hands pretty much meaningless???"

yep

conversely check out the 3-4 biggest pots that you won and realize if you'd been sucked out on for those 4 pots, what your winrate would be.