10,000 hands!

I made it! After tonight I now have 10,016 hands of $25nl under my belt. In fact, here's all of my stats from all levels since I started rebuilding.

Most of these numbers probably don't mean anything to those who don't use the PokerTracker software, but some of them are obvious: I've won $416.15 over 10,016 hands at the $25nl (they call it $0.25; this is the size of the big blind, and $25 is the size of the buy-in which is what I have been referring to).

It's also of note that I spent the least amount of time at the $10nl level ($0.10) and also had the highest winrate then. This obviously could be due to running good over a small sample size (with poker, anything under 10,000 is considered "small" since the variance is so freaking high), but if I remember correctly, I think this did seem to be the easiest level to play at thus far.

Ok, now here's my graph of winnings thus far over all the levels.

Can't complain about that :) My PokerStars account sat at $602.01 after finishing that off.

Now, on the downside... tonight I also went ahead and played some at the $50nl level, after completing my 10,000 hands of $25nl. And this didn't go so well. I dropped about $60 there tonight.

So that's a bit of a setback. I'm going to keep at it though, and only playing 1-2 tables at a time for now (I've been playing 4-6 at $25nl).

The statistical analyses of the 10,000 hands at $25nl are still to come!

Approaching 10,000 hands

So like I said a while ago, my latest task was to play 10,000 hands at $25nl and then do some statistical analyses. Well, I'm getting close now, sitting at about 9600 hands after playing a little tonight. So I thought it might be nice to start thinking about what analyses I'd actually like to do.

First is the obvious: Statistically, am I a winning player at this level? This should be a fairly straightforward question to answer with the data at hand. I'll also have a point estimate and confidence interval on my winrate.

I'd also like to get winrates and confidence intervals for each position at the table (i.e. big blind, UTG, button, etc). My sample size is obviously going to be a lot smaller for this (should be roughly 1,000 hands per position) but we'll see how wide my confidence intervals are for that.

Finally, I think I'd like to do some analyses examining the pot sizes that I win. Previously (like a long time ago on another site) I used to think I won lots of small pots but then always got it in bad for the big pots. This would obviously be a problem. I haven't thought through exactly how I'll examine this yet, but it should be do-able.

That's about all I can think of for now. I'm sure I'll also just do some data exploration and see what's in there. It might be good to look at hand-specific statistics, i.e. am I losing with AQ, or KQ, or other medium-big hands that I should be winning with? And do I play too much of the junk hands?

After this though, I'm fairly sure I'm going to move up to $50nl. The PokerStars account sits at about $580 right now, so I'm well above Daniel's rules for the move-up. Incidentally, I haven't been able to find any updates lately on his progress.

Anyways, I'll probably start by playing just 1 table at a time for a bit, like 1,000 hands or so. Although that'll be a lot, so maybe a bit less. We'll see...