Normality of winrates

[BillC]

I would be surprised if per hour win rates were far from being normal. I might even suspect that you are using the software incorrectly, or making some other error.

Bruce, why do you think hourly win rates are not (approximately) normal? This question has arisen many times on this site over the years, and never really addressed as far as I know.



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In this thread the question whether poker winrates are normally distributed came up (as normality is often assumed for calculating ROR).

I ran my per hand winrates for 90k hands through every possible test for normality contained in the R software package and each test rejected normality pretty badly.

Even by looking at a histogram of my winrates I can tell they cannot be normally distributed (and it's not even close).

I would like to hear some comments from you guys.

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What time period did each data point represent? If you plot win rates per hand, or per hour, or even per session, these will not be normal; however, if each data point represents a sufficiently long period of time, and there haven't been any major changes to the playing conditions, then you should see that the data begins to be well-approximated by a normal distribution, as guaranteed by the central limit theorem.

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