[fishyak]

Live will you ever get in enough hands to...

1) Have true statistical significance in terms of determining if you are a truly winning player or no? Probably not due to thin margin of "victory" coupled with big standard deviations requiring large numbers of hands to narrow the range of the deviations. And the coup de grace... hopefully, you get BETTER as you play those hands and your target moves!

2) win "more than your share" of these mega-pots? Very hard to answer that one. And while that one pot can determine whether you win or lose for an individual session, the better players appear to adopt the attitude that it is all one session.

3) have a good guessestimate of whether you are a winner or not at a certain level? Yes, IMO, you can. Just keep score all the time and have a running spreadsheet of your results. After about 50 sessions of accurate scorekeeping you should have a baseline that is more likely to be right than wrong. But streaks, hot and cold do happen and I feel that you can allow yourself some "anecdotal" observations about where you stand. For me, I have been unconscious playing 2/4 and my winrate is over 3BB/hr. Over course, I moved up to 4/8 just as a cold streak blew in so my winrate there is breakeven. And I've got 800+ hrs. of play spread across 7 different kinds and levels of poker play this year.

The 1BB/hr. rate IMO still remains evidence of a good solid winner with enough hours. My goal is to get all my games to that rate or better.

So keep accurate score. IMO, winners keep score, whiners complain about bad beats. I also believe that by having focus on your total poker picture, you can balance out the days you are killing it with TPTK value bets that hold up for smaller pots against the monsters that get away.

Make sense?