[Blarg]

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I remember reading a post a while back where someone ran BB/100 and the SD on a computer program that spit out the normal distribution of the winrate for 100 players over 100K hands (I would be very grateful if someone had a link). The numbers he input where, I think, 2PTBB/100 and an SD of 45. This was for limit and this is a very good winrate. The program ran all the numbers and reported winrate for those 100 imaginary players over 100K hands. The results were that 4 out of the 100 people had a winrate of below .4BB/100 or almost break even over 100 thousand hands. Those are scary numbers. So, to really know your true winrate you might need more than 50K hands, you might need a million to be absolutly sure. This means that even the best poker players will have 20k, 50k or even 100k breakeven streches. And you never know when it will happen. All you can do is improve your game cause most people, even some excellent players, underestimate the true power of Variance.

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I think this is very true, and becomes pretty clear when you've built up a couple or few 50k samples. Especially if you look how much a single starting hand, a pair of aces, contributes to your profit total. I noticed in limit that it took very few aces coming out differently to have quite a notable effect on a 50k sample size's profitability. It was pretty unnerving, really, and a little hard to believe, how so few hands could skew the stats so strongly.