How many hands to really see the picture?

Just wondering as I move towards my first 1000 hands how many thousands I should play before I really have a good idea of my progress. I see people on here doing their first 10,000 hands, etc. Playing as often as I do (not much) it is hard to get the hand count up significantly.

This week I'm planning on trying two tables to see what happens.

after about 10-15k hands you will know if you are beating the game or not. you need much more to get any kind of decent estimation of your true winrate.

1,000,000,000 will tell a pretty good picture.

Originally Posted by givememyleg

1,000,000,000 will tell a pretty good picture.

bigger sample size please

A few thousand can show you obvious leaks, related to VP$IP, PFR, etc... but I don't think it can show you much else like leaks related to specific hands or positions until you get a much larger sample size.


This is just my assumption looking at the numbers. Even with a couple thousand hands, certain hands like KQs have only been dealt to me 4 or 5 times.

Originally Posted by Harry

A few thousand can show you obvious leaks, related to VP$IP, PFR, etc... but I don't think it can show you much else like leaks related to specific hands or positions until you get a much larger sample size.

For me, it was about 5,000 hands and I started to see that Ax where x < 10 was just a constant loser. As a beginner, I was just so damned excited to see that A. It would be bombs away LOL.

At 25,000 hands, I started looking at pocket pairs and sc's.

At 50,000, I still can't figure out position stats clearly but I'm working on it.

ponyboy your best bet is to analyse your hand histories and post and discuss hands since it takes a very large number of hands to get a good picture

I can get a good idea of how somebody plays after watching them for a few hands.

Determining a 'true' win rate for a particular player with a relatively high degree of accuracy(of course ignoring subtle changes to their game, and the players they are playing) probably takes a million hands.