Results for May 2012

May didn't go as planned, but it sure illustrates the ups and downs of poker.  After a good two weeks I went into a nasty downswing, and I was happy to get through it, still up for the month.


Results for May, 2012
$33.15    5/1-5/5 (partial week)
  40.47    5/6-5/12
 -10.91    5/13-5/19
 -24.38    5/20-5/26
 -10.40    5/27-5/31 (partial week)
---------
$27.43    May profit or loss


Poker players all talk about the long term, and about short-term results meaning nothing.  So I decided to do a little math and figure out exactly what long-term means to me.

Some players insist that to reach a long term that has any statistical meaning would take a million hands or more.  For many players that would take 20 years or more, so it's not a very practical number.  I decided to use 10,000 hands.  When beginners post statistics on the 2+2 poker forums and ask for a critique, they are often told something like, "Small sample size.  Come back when you have at least 10K hands."  So I'll take that number as a minimum definition of the long term.

Counting hands is easy.  Playing online you play about one hand a minute, and playing live you get about one hand every two minutes.  Almost all of my play is online, so I'll use those numbers to keep the math simple.

Let's say that I play 25 hours a week, study about 10 hours, and the other 5 hours are administrative.  If I play 25 hours a week, that's 1,500 minutes, which comes to 1,500 hands. (That number is actually a little high, since tournaments have a 5-minute break every hour, but I'm keeping things simple.)

If I'm playing 1,500 hands a week, it will take me close to 7 weeks to play 10,000 hands.  So the absolute minimum time for my results to have any statistical meaning is 7 weeks.  So when, in a recent entry, I was spouting off about stringing a couple $100 months together, that could happen at my current level (tournaments up to $5) but I certainly can't count on it.  To put it another way, I could string several good months together, but I could also have several bad months is a row.

The bottom line is that with the number of hands I'm currently playing, assuming that I have an edge over the people I'm playing against, I could with some confidence expect to profitable over the course of a year.  Over a shorter time period, there are no guarantees,

Isn't variance fun?