A friend of mine recently asked me how many live hours at any stake should it take to somewhat see what your true win rate is so that variance isn't so much a factor. I told him I honestly have no clue. Any suggestions, thanks guys!

id guess 3000 hours

Wow good thing I didn't answer, I was going to tell him500 hours

If you imagined that you had a "true" win rate, that never changed and was not affected by external circumstances, then as time goes on, the win rate that you experience will approach, but never reach, your "true" win rate. So in a sense, there is no answer to this question - you can not say exactly what your true win rate is just from looking at your results.

What you can do is say that there is a high probability that your win rate falls in a specific range.

3000 hours is probably a pretty serious under-estimate unless you are not very concerned with accuracy. That's probably only about 10,000 hands. For an online player, I would even hazard a guess to their win rate before 100,000 hands. I don't think you could even determine if someone is a *winning player* at 100k hands, much less guessing their win rate.

I just did a back of the envelope calculation and determined that someone with a "true" win rate of 5bb/100 and a standard deviation of 80bb/100 has a 26% chance of being below 0bb/100 after 10k hands. The opposite of this is that a -5bb/100 player (which is a HUGE loser) has a 26% chance of being above even after 10k hands.

At 100k hands this number falls to about 2.5%. Which seems pretty small.

But consider that at 100k hands, this 5bb/100 player has a 16% chance of winning at 2.5bb/100 or lower (and a 16% chance of winning at 7.5bb/higher). So 32% of the time we're more than 50% away from their true number.

(100,000 hands is basically a solid year of playing 8 hours/day EVERY DAY)

Rusty, everything is correct. However for a live 2/5 game or similar 30-40bb/100 is a pretty reasonable winrate, the deviations would be so small that the confidence interval would be a lot smaller, the only thing which won`t be clear is if you are winning at 30bb/100 or at 33.5bb/100, however who cares.

I should probably point out that 3000 hours at ~30h/h is not 10k but rather 100k hands.

In live poker this should really give you a good indication of your winrate, at least in percentage of your actual results. Winrates in live games tend to get pretty darn high so if you're winning at 20bb/100 instead of 25bb/100 you'd hardly notice but online a 5bb/100 spread over 100k hands is sometimes enough to lose over that period if your true winrate was 4bb/100.

Oh right, duh, 100k for 3000 hours not 10k.

If win rates are that high then 100k hands could easily be enough.

Be sure that you're accurately counting win rates though. If you win $100 but you pay $40 in parking, gas, tips and food, then you really won $60.

Ty all for your amazing feedback! Much appreciated!