How many thousand hands can the downswings last?

[JussiUt]

See the question above. It's been quite depressing for me lately and I was just wondering what kind of downswings have you experienced?

[raze]

I am breakeven over my last 27,000 hands (3/6 and 5/10 short). In that time I've had separate drops of 290BB and 150BB. Thank god for bonus/rakeback

If you really want to be depressed, go poke around Brags, Beats / Variance

Whoops, I didn't answer your question. Both downswings lasted about 5,000 hands

[Lifthanger]

the lower your real winrate is, the larger downswings can get.
for a 1BB/100 hands winner, it is possible to get onto a 100K hands breakeven streak.
Dealing with this is hard.. I'm bad at this, too.

[topspin]

[ QUOTE ]
the lower your real winrate is, the larger downswings can get.
for a 1BB/100 hands winner, it is possible to get onto a 100K hands breakeven streak.
Dealing with this is hard.. I'm bad at this, too.

[/ QUOTE ]

Possible but very unlikely. Suppose you're a 2BB/100 winner with a SD of 15.5BB/100. After 100K hands, your probability of being breakeven or worse is only 2.25e-5, or 0.002%.

If your winrate per 100 hands is M, and your SD/100 is S, and you play N*100 hands, then you can calculate the probability of your being breakeven or worse using Excel (with the Analysis Toolpack added in) as:

=0.5*ERFC(M/S*SQRT(N)/SQRT(2))