Hey guys, I have a few questions regarding what would be considered a "realistic" sample size of the amount of hours playing to be considered a winning player.

Also, I had a question about tipping and what % of your $$ won should be given away in tips? If that makes sense...

So, anyways, I've logged 123 hours of playing 1/2, with a gross profit for $4,290 making $35.09/hr
Is this hour sample long enough to confidently say "I'm a winning player"? How many hours would you consider to be realistic.

As far as tipping goes, in those 123 hours, I've given away $469 in tips, which comes out to almost 11% of my gross.
My net winnings is $3,821 at 31.25/hr.
My tipping is 12.25% of my net winnings.

I personally feel like my tipping is way to high, but looking at it overall, I'm thinking its not too bad, but giving away almost $500 is crazy...

Also, comments on my winrate etc. is much appreciated.
Thanks!

This will prob be moved to the winrates and bank roll thread which if you spend some time reading will give you a sense of what to expect.

You are running well.

1000 hours is when you'll start to get a decent idea of your true win rate.

123 hours is not even close to a large enough sample to conclude if you are a winner player. At 30 hands an hour you're only seeing 3690 hands over 123 hours.

You are running well, and your sample size is too small to know what your true winrate is, but it is very likely you are a winning player at live 1/2 based on these results. It's pretty unlikely you'd have a 19 buy in upswing without some sort of edge.

Good job sir.

Any winning is certainly good.

That said, all of the other posters are correct, sample size is tricky! And variance in live poker is horrifically (and sometimes triumphantly) fickle. I dont know how long it takes you to play 123 hours. For me that is a little over a month.

In any given month, or 100 hr block, crazy things can happen. I would not begin to even think about this type of question until you have played about 30,000 hands (about 1,000 hours Id say). Anything prior to that is not going to be accurate and it is either going to cause you to be overconfident (and maybe cause you to not notice or work on areas of your game that need attention) or underconfident (which can lead to a whole slew of negative consequences).

Do yourself a favor and focus on the qualitative results of your game. And do not look at the quantitative results until you hit 1,000 hours.

Good luck.

123 hours is nothing. Go look at the graphs from online players. Even great players have periods of 3,500 hands where they lose money. 1,000 hours is good number for a winrate, but I think you usually have an idea after 10,000 hands if you're a winning player.

If you're a winning player after you triple your current hours, you're probably a winning player; but a true winrate will take longer than that.

I've been playing with a guy for the last month who is kind of bad at poker. He'll do things like bet $5 into a $50 pot (he does this on a regular basis). He calls pre-flop raises with Q5o from the small blind. For the first three weeks he played, he was well ahead. This was ~123 hours. This past week he got crushed and is now a losing player. His draws stopped coming in. His big pairs started getting cracked.

95% of people who sit down at $1/2 are capable of being a winning player after 123 hours. I would guess that ~5% are so bad that even getting hit with the deck in every big pot wouldn't stop them from being a losing player over 123 hours.

I would advise checking your stats again once you hit 456 hours, and again once you're at 789 hours.

We have an entire thread that is dedicated only to questions like:
How much can I win?
How many hours do I need to play to prove I'm a winner?
Am I fish on a heater, or a whale on a heater?

In the 'Stickied' section you will find it.

Best of luck to you,
irtm