How long does it take to know you're winning in LHE?

[maverickai]

I've been having bad results for 5000 hands. May I know after how many hands do the winning players here feel more confident they are winning?

Would like to hear your experiences.

[Rek]

46983 hands.

Seriously, the bigger the sample the more acurate the data but 5000 is not enough IMHO.

pzhon should be on here soon to give you a formula for a good estimate though.

[maverickai]

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46983 hands.


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You serious about that no.? I played about 1200 hds today, and seems to be getting 'raped' by the turns and river. Just need some perspective here.

Anyway, I've clocked 13000 hands. Where would be the place in the forum to post my stats for c&c?

[uDevil]

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I've been having bad results for 5000 hands. May I know after how many hands do the winning players here feel more confident they are winning?


[/ QUOTE ]

How confident is confident? Try playing with this:

http://www.castrovalva.com/~la/winlose.htm

[Alobar]

you need tens and tens of thousands of hands before you come even close to converge on your winrate. Hundreds of thousands even

My advice is that while its possible you are running bad, its much more likely that you just arent very good. Everyone gets raped by turns and rivers, but in my experience when new players complain about it, it more has to do with them playing bad than bad luck.

So just keep studying and thinking about making good decisions, its the only thing you can do.

[choccypie]

A friend of mine said 40000-50000 hands is a good sample of how well you're doing in poker. The larger the sample the better really.

[Sir Folds A Lot]

I play on Poker Stars, how do I even get my stats?

[Xylocain]

It takes fewer hands than most people here think to get an idea of wheter you are a winning or losing player. (I think most people confuse it with determining actual win rate wich is basically impossible). What it comes down to is the confidence interval. Basically, you dont need a 95% confidence interval to make an informed estimation.

If you are running at -3BB/100 over 5K hands, your best assumption (~80%) should be that you are not a winning player (yet).

But stop worrying about your wirate, most people loose anyway. Sign up for session review and focus on improving your game instead. (or move down in limits)

[basementproject]

No one ever leaves a winner in LHE.

In the end you might be running 5ptbb/100, but ask yourself this: is it really worth giving up your sanity?

[pzhon]

Here is an excerpt from a past post:

<ul type="square">
There is a useful unit I call the long run, which I define to be how long it takes for breaking even to be 2 standard deviations below average. If your win rate is WR/hour and your standard deviation is SD/hour, this is 4 (SD/WR)^2. For example, if you win 1 BB/hour with a standard deviation of 10 BB/hour (reasonable for many [live] midstakes limit games), the long run is 400 hours.

If your win rate is closer to 0, the long run gets longer. Cutting your win rate in half increases the long run by a factor of 4.

The normal approximation is good at that point, so the probability of being behind when you reach the long run is about 2.5%.

The long run is also the point at which there is a 50% chance that 0 will not be in the rough 95% confidence interval of results +- 2 standard deviations.

At 4 times the long run, breaking even is 4 standard deviations below average, and there is about a 97.5% chance that 0 will not be in your rough 95% confidence interval.

You can be confident that you are a winning player with fewer hands if you pay attention to more than the results. If you notice that your opponents make particular common and costly mistakes, you might be confident that you are a winning player after relatively few hands. For example, when you see players show down garbage from early position, or routinely cold-call with hands that aren't worth limping, you know the game is soft, and you may be able to judge that it is softer than other games you have beaten. [/list]