I’m going to use a friend’s stats who just happens to have played 50000 rounds of poker.

$1/$2NL mostly on Party and Empire. ev $9/100 and sd is $126/100. Does not include bonuses.

After 500 hrs of play we would expect our player to be up $4500, and his sd for that period to be sqrt of 500 x $126.00. So sd would be $2818. Let’s assume he broke even. Then he would be 4500/2818 or 1.6 sd’s down from expectation.

Using the normal distr table. 1.6 sd’s equals .05 or a 1 in 20 shot of flat earnings. This is hardly a lightening strike. Now some of you will have better numbers and some will have worse numbers, but this will at least give you an idea of what you can expect. I suggest if you who want to understand this further go to 2 + 2 and do some searches.

>Make it even more reasonable: 12 BB/100 player with 90 BB/100 std dev. 50k hands means expected value of $12k with about $4k SD -- he's still 3 sigma from break even (less than 1% probability). So, if he plays a ridiculous 50k hands per month, then 1 month in 100 (or once every 9 years) he'll have a break even month. That's not too scary.

I would think a more resonable number for most players would be around my friend's result. What you have here would be for outstanding players.

True winrates need an insane amount of hands to even get within $5/hr of true. But your friend is probably a winning player, he just doesn't have enough hands to say with 95% confidence.

His conf level is 86%, but one of the posters said you have a better chance of getting hit by lightening than being flat after 50K rounds. He considers himself an average player and he had 50K rounds of online poker under his belt so I used his #'s.

My win rate is higher than 4.5BB/100 hands, but I would have to agree that the chances of me breaking even over 50K hands at my current stakes game would be less than the chances of getting hit by lightning.

I just dont believe its possible. I broke even for 10K hands once in the last 3 years. If you saw the crap that happend to me during that streak, you would wnat to quit poker forever. I would need that to happen for 5 times as long.

No way.

Ice, That is what I am saying for almost 2 weeks!!! I have lost 14 allin out of(about) 17 with the mortal nuts or almost the mortal nuts (at the flop most of the times).

I am now breaking even for the last two month (I have 11K hands registered at PT) just because of this 10 days of bad beats. I am up. I did amzingly great at bodg and and absolute poker and didnt put those hands in my PT DB, but the point is I cant believe what has happened to me in these days. I dont know much about the game, and I needed you to discuss a little about bad beats and losing streaks because I handled this quite well, but I was starting to get desperate when some unlikely things started to heppened.

GeoCsays a losing streak of 50K hands could happened. I dont think I could stand one like that. I have lost 325 dollars on 3.1K hands, you make the number for BB/100hands because I am not at my pc and dont have it here. That got me desperate!!


AlexMR

He said that a player with a win rate of 4.5BB/100 hands has a 1 in 20 chance of breaking even for 50K hands sometime in his career. I have no idea if thats correct but lets assume that it is.

I also dont know if thats a true 4.5BB/100 hands or 4.5PTBBs

Either way, you dont even know what your actual win rate is yet because you havent played enough. You need 20K or more hands to get a good feel for what you will win long term. You could be a losing or breakeven player and had just been on a short term winning streak.

I suggest tightening up and not getting involved in marginal situations for a while until you get it turned around.

Im playing fairly badly myself right now and getting outdrawn at record pace, so I know what youre going through.