Small loser over the last 300 hours. How accurate is a 300 hour live sample size?

Online guys will say 300 hours is pretty small but that's still a lot of poker. Roughly 50 sessions. Its a good gauge of where you're at but wouldn't look too much into results just yet. Once you hit 700-1000 hours you get a realistic view of where you stand.

If you're a slight loser after 50 sessions adjust your strat accordingly.

I don't think anyone has a good answer for this. It depends a lot on how tough your games are.

It is definitely not unheard of for a good player or even a crusher to have a 300 hour breakeven stretch, but the question is, how likely is it that your 300 hour breakeven stretch happened on your first 300 hours tracking?


I think it is a significant enough length of time that you should at the very least be taking a closer look at your game and trying to plug leaks, however it certainly doesn't rule out the possibility that you are actually a consistent long term winner, or even crusher at your game. It just makes it less likely to be the case than if you were winning $30/hour or more.

300 hours should give you enough time to figure out if your game is beatable over the long run; which is different than I can beat this game over the long run with my current skill set.

Have those hours been logged during the same days of the week? The games I play in change fairly dramatically on the weekends vs weekday mid-afternoon/early evening. I think 300 hours played solely during the Friday/Saturday golden hours will be slightly less accurate because there is a lot more variance when playing against a wild crowd.

It would be very rare for a winning player to have a 300 hour break even stretch, let alone be losing. I would say the maximum length of time of a breakeven stretch for a crusher is closer to 100 hours than it is 300. 1000 hours is way to long to get a gauge of your winrate. 500 hours should be more than sufficient.

I think you are probably underestimating the variance involved.

I play in some very soft games. over my last 325 hours I am winning 16 bb/hour. In the middle of that 325 hour stretch is a 30 session/120 hour breakeven stretch.

Actually, you pretty much validated my point. Your breakeven stretch was a little over 100 hours, but nothing more.

Actually live it is a small sample probably and your sample size should be viewed as the number of hands played. Win rate, standard deviation, and sample size will define the bounds your results fall in. There's a formula, buy Mason's book, Gambling Theory and Other Topics for a detailed description.

Depends on your HH's. What is happening in all your big pots? Have there been many or do you just call too much and fold? The fact that your a loser over 300 hands sucks but you may not necessarily be a loser. Look back at and play t some HH's so you can get an idea of what's going on.

http://pokerdope.com/poker-variance-calculator/

Try 10bb/100 winrate and 100 SD over 9k hands.

I would say there is a very good chance that your actual edge over that period was plus or minus $45/hr from the loss rate you experienced.

sent from my secret chat thread

Pretty good estimate in my opinion.

+1 to this

300 Hours is pretty significant... Online a good estimate would be minimum of 10k hands+? Even that's too little... It's very hard to track how many hands u play live btw.

it really depends on how tough your games are and how you are feeling. Do you tilt after you lose a buy in? Are you selecting good games?

300 hours is a lot of poker, and i'd say if you are losing over 300 hours you need some work to do.

Were you card dead? What did you do to over come it? Did you punish limpers? Are you waiting to catch hands or are you attacking weakness? When you are out of the hand are you closely watching the action or playing on your phone?


A lot of information gets over looked in poker especially when pulling long hours. Pay close attention and you will find great spots to win pots.

It depends on what type of answer that you want.

If you want an actual statistical answer, the answer is that you don't have a 300 hour statistical sample. It would require over the 300 hour period that you learned nothing new about poker or your opponents and that they learned nothing either. That is unlikely.

If you want the average poker player with a high school education answer, 300 hours is plenty of time to know if you are a winner or not. If I was hustling you, I'd tell you it meant something if you were a winner and it didn't if you weren't.

this is not significant. you can argue against it, but it just isn´t.

Only someone that hasn't been anywhere near the abyss could think this.

it also depends on your style, the number of hands you are playing and the size of pots you are playing.

Always remember that in this game one can expect no reward, that in this world of poker there is neither honor nor justice. In this NL poker world one has to be cunning in order to succeed.

So, to answer your question, even 4 to 8 hours is gonna be enough to win big stacks every time you sit down if you know how to be cunning your opponents into giving you their money.

That's why NL poker is called to be an art and not a science. The scientific part is a mere 1% with the rest of 99% being and art at the highest level of cunning.

Speaks like a true hustler...

More than the winrate is how you do it. Did you win a few huge pots while way behind? Or do you push action and win tons of small pots, while raking in the huge ones?

I guess it depends on playing style and softness of game, but a solid TAG strategy should get you experiencing not much worse than 100 hours of breakeven. I'm speaking from experience on that. How can anyone be a 10bb/hr crusher and go on 500 hour break-even stretches in cash games?

People comparing the volume needed from online to cash are comparing apples to oranges. The edge is so much bigger in live cash games that you don't need that much volume to figure out your win rate. Live cash games give you so many spots where you're atleast an 80/20, 70/30, 65/35 favorite, that it doesn't take that long before you blast past even the worst cases of run bad. If someone is going hundred of hours playing live and not making any money then their game has leaks. Period.

A 500 hour breakeven stretch would be rare, but not unheard of for a crusher. If we take a 10BB/h winner with a SD of 100BB/h:
n0 = (z*SD/WR)^2
500 = (z*100/10)^2
z = sqrt(500)/10
z = 2.236
This player is about 1.3% likely to be <= even over any given 500 hour stretch.

I've personally never had anywhere near a 500 hour breakeven stretch, but I've only got around 850 hours. 100 hour breakeven stretches seem common for me.

ROFL. 100 hours is 12 8 hour sessions. There's AT LEAST a 1/5 chance of being down (or barely even) during any selected 100 hours.

If you don't have a 20% chance of having a bad 100 hours, then you are not pressing your edges nearly enough.

Please post these sorts of questions in the official winrates, bankroll and finances thread.