Just wondering.... what exactly qualifies a player to have 'beat' a certain limit? Is there a specific dollar amount made at a level that would validate this? A certain number of hands played? How would a player know? Sorry if this question is lame, just curious as I see certain players have made even thousands at the 2NL limit before moving to 5NL (i.e. BlackRain79). Thanks!

Usually players look for a certain bb/100 winrate over a respectable number of hands at a limit to see if they're beating it. The exact winrate varies from player to player.

It can be a dollar amount sometimes as well. Well, not exactly a dollar amount but a number of buy-ins. Players win at one limit and end up with a certain number of buy-ins for the next limit, at which point they're willing to take a shot at the higher one.

Supposed you had played N hands at a particular level, and that you had won W Poker Tracker big bets (ptbb) over the course of those hands. Then your win rate is WR = W/(N/100) = 100*W/N ptbb/100. You can also compute your standard deviation -- actually Poker Tracker or Hold'Em Manager computes it for you -- and it is SD ptbb/100.

Your standard deviation is a measure of how much fluctuation you can expect in a hundred-hand sample .You can use your standard deviation to compute what is called the "standard error" of your overall win rate. The standard error is the standard deviation over a hundred hands divided by the square root of the number of hundred-hand samples you have. For N hands, and a standard deviation of SD ptbb/100, the standard error of your win rate will be SE = SD/sqrt(N/100) = 10*SD/sqrt(N).

To be very confident that you are a winning player, your win rate should be large compared to its standard error. If WR ~ SE, then there is roughly 1 chance in 3 that you're a loser who happened to get lucky. If WR ~ 2*SE than there is one chance in 20 that you are a lucky loser; and if WR ~ 3*SE, the odds are about 500:1 that you are a genuine winner.

I'm a limit hold'em player for the most part, and so I think of win rates on the order 1-2 ptbb/100 and standard deviations on the order of 10-12 ptbb/100. To be 95% sure that a 1 BB/100 winner with a SD of 12 BB/100 is in fact a winner, we would want enough hands such that 10/sqrt(N) > 1/24; Solving for n, we would need more than 57600 hands for this to be the case.

The typical number tossed around by posters on this forum is 100,000 hands. That's the right ballpark; but it is useful to know where that number comes from.

blackrain has been around for years tbh, he stays at 2-5nl cause he can crush it and make like $1500 a month from it and when he moves up he gets crushed... you dont need to play a million hands to "beat a limit".. but i think its just building a roll required to move up to the next limit, i would consider that beating a limit

These are great replies - definitely answered my question! Thanks everyone :-)

If I'm able to build my roll enough to get to the next level, I have now beat the limit.

For me its a bankroll number to reach and a psychological hurdle. I play MTT (90&180's) and I move up when my roll is ready for the next stage and when I have taken 1st or reached the final table in 3 out of 4 tries (etc.).