Good or Lucky? PT stat question

[EWillers]

I know the math guys can answer this much more precisely, but. . .

100K minimum I think is quite a bit too high. It depends, of course, on how accurate you want your rate to be. But in the time it takes to accumulate 100k hands (unless you're playing 2 or 3k a day) I imagine that the "goodness" of the games will have varied enough over the time the hands are played to outweigh any more precision in the winrate created by playing 100k hands vs. say, 20k hands.

I think that it's a scale. The smaller the # of hands, the more off your winrate may be. As the # of hands goes up, the more accurate the winrate tends to become. Beware of comparing hands from 6 months ago to hands played now tho. 1) You may have gotten better (or worse) and 2) (more likely) the games are noticably better or worse now than they were 6 months ago.

Bottom line, in my opinion, 10k or so will give you a pretty good indication and 20-30k will give you solid enough of a win rate to feel comfortable about (assuming the level of play remains relatively constant--big assumptioin).

[astroglide]

10k is not REMOTELY enough. i have played hundreds of thousands of hands and have had many breakeven or losing stretches over periods that long.

[MMMMMM]

I pretty much agree with 100K hands for a dependable reading, just based on B&M. That is about 2 years full time play at B&M and that is about the time it should take for a really good reading IMO. Playing B&M, even very good players sometimes do run significantly good or bad for 6 months or even for a year. Of course more than 100K hands would be better still.

I don't have nearly the number of hands logged in PT that you do, Astro, but it is nice to know that your online stats roughly match my feel for B&M fluctuations.

[Thythe]

I agree with astroglide. 100K is the bare minimum to start drawing convincing conclusions.

[dogmeat]

I have to agree that 10K is not nearly enough. I have seen a lot of fluctuation in 5k and 10k samples. However, in my case, once I reached about 30K in pt I have seen only small changes in my overall hourly win. I have been playing mostly the same limit for almost 50K now, and my hourly rate has only varied by about a $1 up or down. Even with a cold-streak of about 10 days, once the next week went by my numbers were the same as before the streak.

I guess that is a long winded way of saying that for a player that is not necessarily improving, 30K hands should be a very good indication.

Dogmeat [img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]

[dogmeat]

See "Some Simulations" thread for some more numbers. I stand corrected to a minimum of 250,000 hands.

Dogmeat [img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]