[Fiasco]

This is such a recurring theme on these forums. New kid shows up, says "Hi, im new. I havent been playing long but it looks like im doing real well."

Regulars say "Your dumb. You dont understand sample size. Youre on a heater. Its going to get worse."

Very few of these regulars back up any of there statistical assertions with any sort of math. They have heard that you need a large sample size to get a precise understanding of your winrate, and neglect the fact that even with a small sample size an extremely high winrate is NOT MEANINGLESS but in fact is a good indicition that the player in question is at least a winning player and probably will have a decent winrate.

Now Im not familiar with the exact math involved for approximating longterm expectation on ROI, but I ran into these conversations all the time about cash players who were making 10 PTBB/100 over 50k hands and having people tell them that their sample size was meaningless. I finally got sick of it and went out and started plugging numbers into equations and figured out that the conventional wisdom was wrong. After all a small sample size just means there can be a large variation in your expected winrate, but that variation is still centered around your current winrate.


OP: congrats on your awesome results so far. Looks like youre making roughly $160 a day which should be plenty for a 23 year old to live off of. Your sharkscope numbers are very impressive, hope you continue to have that level of success.


As for others: Lets say that all of his positive numbers were negative. Lets say that he had an ROI of -32% and an average profit of -$10 over a 500 SNG sample size. Would you tell him, hey dont worry about the $5000 youve lost, your sample size is tiny, you might actually be a winning player, keep plugging away at it. (well you might, but only because you want more fish in the pond)

If his numbers were negative youd think he was an awful player, doomed to failure. But his numbers are positive and dont fit into your understanding of what people should be winning at these games, and so you dismiss them.