General Philosophy

[Aaron W.]

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Over 20k hands, your WR doesn't mean much.

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This is complete BS.

There are 3 factors: winrate, # of hands played, and standard deviation. We know two of the factors already, and even using a grossly inflated standard deviation of 55BB/100, he is still a winning player out to 99.99999% confidence. Using a more normal, but still inflated standard deviation of 21BB/100 we can say with 99.9% confidence that he's earning at least 1.5BB/100.

This is basic stuff you can find in the FAQ.

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Hmmm, I am open to the idea that you are correct, but I have often seen people saying WR doesn't start to converge until like 100k hands. Maybe you could go over a little bit of the math for me, or just quote where you saw it in the FAQ (I looked but did not find it). FWIW, I recall a post where one of the more veteran posters (Josh. perhaps) ran 10 100k hand samples for players with 2BB/100, and got results as low as 1BB/100 and as high as 3BB/100 over that sample. I do have a very limited knowledge of stats and am familiar with terminology, but am not exactly sure how you came to these conclusions. Please help. Thanks.

Brad

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If I recall correctly, the point was to point out that you don't actually ever know your true winrate. This is different from saying that winrate doesn't carry information. Your winrate after 10k hands gives you enough information to reasonably say you are a winning player (assuming your BB/100 is above 1 or 1.5 -- someone else can figure that out because I'm not a statistician). After 20k hands, you can say it with even more confidence with the same BB/100.