What's my win rate? Sample graphs from 110K hands!

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There has been some posts about win rates lately, so I thought I should investigate my own stats a little closer. Perhaps others are interested, so I post the results here.

When: Dec 1 2004 - Dec 1 2005
Site: PartyPoker
Game: $2/$4 Limit Holdem
Hands: 110K
Win rate: 2.17 BB/100

The problem with finding out your win rate is that the variance can be a bitch (and it will be!). To see what degree of bitchiness it can acheive, I took my PokerTracker data and split it up in chunks of 100 hands (PostgreSQL PG Admin is your friend). I then calculated the win rate for all subsets of 10K hands in the total sample size of 100K. That is, first sample of 10K hands contains hand 1-10000; second sample is hand 101-10100; ...; last sample is hand 100001-110000. This is repeated for all subsets of 20K up to 100K hands.

Each graph below shows how the win rate for a sample size fluctuates around the win rate calculated for all hands (110K). I'm a little sloppy and call the last value a "True" win rate, but only in the meaning of "true win rate for all 110K hands", not my acutal true win rate (which I don't know). There's also Min and Max values for win rate, and a Diff value for Max minus Min (even though the interesting Diff value is Min/Max versus True).

Some random note/s...

(1) Quite often people post or quote their Pokertracker stats after some 10K hands. I've had bad runs of (at least) 10K hands where I have lost money. 10K hands may sound quite much, but it isn't. It may sound strange to Average Joe that a winning player is down for that many hands, but it isn't. The numbers fool you.

(2) I'm tired and hungry.

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