How many hands needs to be played to see are you good or not?

[mattaasen]

If your looking to find out if u are good or not haha, id say play 25k-50k hands at a certain level and then look at your stats. Review every pot u get stacked in. U can get an idea, although it can swing a lot either way. Also When your playing just think about situaitons u see other players getting into, and how they are playing thier hands I can tell if i am plus ev in a game, especially full ring or 6 max pretty fast. THis is easy to do, since a lot of 9 max is just standard play. IF u see people deviating from playing hands standardly then if its not like 1knl or above it shoudl be easy to gauge the strength of the game. IT has the added side benifit of helping u think about unprofitable situations, and understanding how to counter them

[grouchie]

after 500k hands i'm pretty sure i'm not good at this game.
But, I'm not gawd awful horrible eithor.

Thanks VPPs and Rakeback!!

[Crazy Porto]

don't forget that the edge you have is a lot smaller at the higher stakes so you need a bigger sample.

i think 10k hands in the micro's will give you a pretty good idea of your a winning player or not.(using your common sence to of course)
The more the better of course 3-5BB/100hands is a very nice winrate but to know this for sure you need a much larger sample like 500k.

[KurtSF]

[ QUOTE ]

If I had to generically come up with some numbers that were a close fit for everybody:

100k should tell you if you are winning or not
300k should tell you your winrate within 1ptBB
3mil should tell you your winrate within .1ptBB

[/ QUOTE ]

This is NOT true for everyone. It is true for everyone with 1pokerboy's true winrate. DUCY?

If you're some six-max god who's true win rate is 12ptbb/100 it will not take much more than 10k hands to have 99% confidence you are a winner. It will still take an ungodly number of hands to really know your true winrate however.

OTOH, if you're a marginal winner, say a true winrate or 0.5ptbb/100, it would take probably a million hands to be sure you're not a loser.

[threads13]

I would like to suggest that this is placed this thread in the FAQ. This question gets asked a ton.

[CalledDownLight]

[ QUOTE ]
what im saying is that it should be pretty obvious in 10k hands whether u are getting pawned or pawning. You have to be honest with yourself and realize when you are being outplayed.

[/ QUOTE ]

agreed


I have a low, but positive overall winrate. By just looking at my winrate you might say I was decent (actually I think anyone who wins should be considered a great player since thats about 2-3% of poker players according to most statistics, but I'll stick with the way people on 2p2 usually address this). However, in the past I have dropped 10+ buyins in as little as 300 or so hands due to massive tilt. Obviously this kills my winrate, but doesn't make me a worse player overall (I'm trying to say that if you play me everyday then I maybe a huge spew monkey for one 300 hand stretch and play another 29700 hands of pretty good poker). Therefore, someone with a winrate of -5ptbb/100 could easily be a better player than the person with a 0ptbb/100 winrate. Winrate is obviously correlated to skill as a player, but is also tied into many factors outside of that (ie. tilt, running hot/cold, having some huge fish sit and reload 20x after getting stacked like every 10 hands, and all kinds of other factors that you may not even see occur in 50k hand samples. Obviously, tilt management is a part of being a good player, but occasionally tilting badly does not automatically make you a bad player whereas many other things you could do will put you in the latter category.

My basic point is that you can tell how good you are in a much smaller sample than you can find out your true winrate, because skill is a single measure whereas winrate encompasses a large number of variables.

edit: I steered kind of away from the general discussion and more towards OP's question which deals with being a bad, average, or good player, not with being a winner or a loser. There is a distinction and it is important people. For a forum that emphasizes not being results oriented its pretty appalling how much all of you are focusing on results in this thread.

[pete6969]

[ QUOTE ]
I've seen 300k break even streaks in winning players graphs. so 500k is my guess.

[/ QUOTE ]
i think if you play 300k at breakeven at 100nl you are not good at poker

[Mike Kelley]

I disagree. I think this player is good. He may of been experimenting through that stretch I don't know, but I do know I respect his posts on here.

[1p0kerboy]

[ QUOTE ]
If you're some six-max god

[/ QUOTE ]

Hopefully you would have posted this in the 6-max forum?!?! [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]