When can you know?

[pete fabrizio]

[ QUOTE ]
This is way off topic and probably should be posted elsehwere, but as more of a general question: Given the above, how could anyone ever have any idea if they were a winning live player? If one needs hundreds of thousands of hands to ascertain winrates, it would seem that less than 1% of the live playing population could ever accurately attach meaning to their results. If there's a better link anyone knows of for this question, feel free to post it, b/c I've had this convo with others before.

[/ QUOTE ]

you don't need hundreds of thousands of hands just to establish that you're a "winner," you need that many hands to narrow down your "exact" winrate. and even that may not be "enough" of course, since at the end of hundreds of thousands of hands game conditions have changed, plus you are likely a different player. however, if you have a 50 buy-in month at live poker, it's practically statistically impossible that you were a -EV player over that period, and you can likely establish a 95% confidence interval on your winrate that is well above break-even. all of which is just a function of your observed winrate and your standard deviation (which converges very quickly).

generally though, i think you have to be able to rely on a lot more than your empirical evidence when estimating your winrate in a particular game. you should be able to watch the other players and identify where they're making mistakes that you're not, and where you're gaining value that they miss, etc. from this you can estimate what echelon of players you're in, and then compare it to a typical distribution of winrates. the problem, of course, is that you probably have to be pretty good already to make the necessary estimations.

[SmackinYaUp]

In an entirely different route, you can tell if you're getting a lot of it right by participating in Omaha discussions in this board.

[FireStorm]

I actually play live, so it's really not regarding Omaha. Sorry for hijacking the thread. This was more of a question geared towards the many threads here which lend themselves towards "XYZ # of hands obviously isn't enough to provide relevant info to your question" etc etc. Seems to be a common theme on this site, which leaves us live players in a quandary as far as posting hands.

[donkeykong2]

if you calculate your winrate using this pokerev program you should be able to get better results a lot quicker, i dont know exactly how much though but the standard deviation definitely goes down when changing the flip results to the ev you had.

[pete fabrizio]

[ QUOTE ]
In an entirely different route, you can tell if you're getting a lot of it right by participating in Omaha discussions in this board.

[/ QUOTE ]

i don't know about that

[SmackinYaUp]

Discussion boards may not be a way to conclusively decide if one is a winning player, but replying to HH's without reading everyone else's responses first should give you some idea of where you stand. On top of that, it's just healthy to one's game to participate in poker forums (IMO). This is just a different tangent though, it's not like anyone will get a bb/100 out of it or anything.