whats a solid BB/100 ratio for Omaha?

[gordo16]

So I just very recently started using PokerTracker for Omaha and have logged about 22,000 hands at 25/50. Aside from specific player win/losses though, I find that I don't really use the program for anything. I talked to my friend (who is a NLHE only player) and was told that 5-7 BB/100 means that you are a solid, successful player, and that anything over 10 just pretty much means that you are playing at too low of limits. Does this hold true for Omaha also? Thus far, over about 22,000 hands, I have a 14.20 BB/100 ratio. Should I stick to the current limits or move up? Thanks for your help.

[gordo16]

Also, are there any other statistics on PT that I should be using to analyze my and everyone else's play..

[jbird]

at the lower limits, a good PLO player will have a higher winrate (in PTBB) than the same NLHE player, simply due to the fact that most people are at least competent at NLHE these days.

I can't say re: the super high stakes, I would imagine that most of your competition is more than competent, but I do know that 22k hands is far to small a sample to determine your true winrate in those games.

[gordo16]

I figured as much but my NLHE buddy told me that 5k was usually enough.. So he is just flat out wrong then?

[jbird]

although i've taken several stats courses in both undergrad and grad school, i (maybe purposely) didn't digest too much of it -- Pete, Troll, and a few others are the real stat guys that can tell you when the sample size will start converging towards your long term winrate, but it isn't 22k hands and most definitely isn't 5k, particularly in a game like PLO where your SD is significantly higher than NLHE on average.

but one thing i can say: move up when you are running good and feeling confident. if you take a hit, move back down. this advice can certainly apply to all stakes, even nosebleeds.

[wazz]

That's a pretty hot winrate. 22K hands is nowhere near enough to gauge your true winrate accurately, unfortunately, and you could just be running very hot. In any case, it's unlikely to be deviating too far from your true winrate, and you're likely a big winner in your game. If you're rolled, I say move up.

[gordo16]

Thanks guys. So what is a reasonable number of hands to judge longterm winrates then?

[pete fabrizio]

i'm too lazy to do this right and come up with a general formula for you, but i've calculated the standard deviations on winrates over a number of hand milestones (using my sd/100 of 90):

10k hands: 9
20k hands: 6.36
50k hands: 4.02
100k hands: 2.84
200k hands: 2.01
500k hands: 1.27
1m hands: .9

so a 95% confidence interval should be around +/- 2 * the number above. e.g. about 5% of 6bb/100 winners will run at 8bb/100 over a million hands. and just for you, gordo, the sd over 22k hands is 6.07 bb/100. so in theory, a 95% confidence interval would be +/- ~12bb/100, so there's still a decent chance that your "true" winrate is below 2bb/100. specifically, about 5% of 2bb/100 winners will have your winrate over a 22k hand sample.

while this is a good place to start, it doesn't actually create a confidence interval for *your* winrate, since when you have a high observed winrate it's much more likely that you're running good than that you're running bad (e.g., there's really no chance that your true winrate is 26 bb/100). this could be corrected for in theory, but you'd need a good model for the distribution of winrates over the general population of players and I have no idea about that.

[pete fabrizio]

I think i made a mistake in that last post. At the 95% level, it should say that 2.5% of the people with a true winrate of 2 sd below your winrate will run as well as you over whatever # of hands, since i used the z-score of a 2-tail distribution.

Anyway, I've corrected that, and I also wanted to make something people could reference in the future, since this question is asked like every other day. So here's a generic table based on an SD or 80 and wr/100 of 8. The "x% min" columns mean that that %age of the people with the winrate in that column will run at 8bb/100 over that number of hands. E.g., over 20k hands, about a third of people with true winrates of around 5.7 bb/100 will run at or better than 8bb/100, and about 5% of people who are 1.3 bb/100 losers will run at 8bb/100 as well.



Note that these outcomes are dependant on the standard deviation but NOT on the winrate. So it's perfectly fine to plug in a different winrate, and just take the winrate and subtract the z-score for the %age you want times the number under "sd in bb/100." The z-score for 33% is .439, for 25% is .674, and for 5% is 1.645.

[RoundTower]

also something to bear in mind: people are much more likely to come here and say "is this a good winrate?" if they have been running hot. Really, you should measure your winrate over the next 50k hands or whatever, not the last 50k.