How many hands does one need to play in order to have the results/trends be significant. I don't mean just statistically signficant...but how many to show that you are indeed a winning/losing player, crushing the games, etc.?

Thanks for the help.

a million is what I've heard.

100k probably

this is an ambiguous question and it's pretty unanswerable.

it's all about certainty, or HOW confident you want to be (confidence interval is the term).

if you want 90% confidence, you could probably get away with X number of hands.

95% confidence, you'd need more, 99% confidence you'd need much more, 99.99% confidence, a huge sample, etc.

aseem

From what I've seen, to get at least general comments (nothing too specific), you need 10k-25k depending on how consistant you consider yourself to stay...i.e., how often you stick to your style. Obviously the more you stick to a standard style, the less hands you need to see a patter, but if you're starting out and trying to find a way to play, you'll need minimum 25k hands.

It also depends on how big of a range around your win rate you want to zero in on. In otherwords if you're -10BB/100 over 3K hands there's probably a decent chance you're a losing player. If you're 3BB/100 over 3K hands there's a decent chance you're a winning player though your actual winrate may be anywhere between 0-6BB/100.

If all you care about is are you a winning player or a losing player I'd guess that 3K hands would give you a reasonable basis for estimating. If you're better than 2BB/100 you're likely a winning player, worse than -2BB/100 you're likely a losing player. Somewhere in between - call yourself break even and make up the difference with bonuses.