PT Stats?

Am I right in thinking that any ring game stats (pokertracker) are really not indicative under 10,000 hand?

What about for tournaments?

10,000 is usually considered the number to start drawing formative ideas about long term profitability. I've seen discussions though where you are talking 100,000+ before conclusions can be drawn and I think this is reasonable. On the other hand VPIP and PFR start to take shape pretty quickly and there's other things that can be deduced from a smallish sample.

Tournaments are much more complicated to analyse using PT as they change structure as they proceed. Also you may find yourself shortstacked and pretty much fold 100 hands in a row, or have a decent stack early and play a lot of cheap hands. Different buy-ins, turbos, rebuys, qualifiers, SnGs all have different impact on your game and stats. This skews the data so more filters and more caution have to be used when analysing tourney hands in order to ensure the dataset you are using is consistent and valid. The data about amount won absolutely has to be in terms of BBs won rather than chips to make much sense.

What would you say the equivalent sample size is for tournaments? 100? 1,000?

A lot more than for Ring.

Say you need 10,000 hands in comparable circumstances to draw conclusions you will need to play a lot more to have the data.

I play as tight as a gnats watsit early in SnGs, my VPIP is probably <10%. Once the first five levels are over it probably moves up to 35%+. To draw conclusions on the entirety of this data is really tricky so you need to filter carefully. I think PT is invaluable for any game but to be honest it has a far broader application in for ring players.

As a tourney player mainly I primarily use it with PAHUD to look at other people VPIP and PFR and occassionally scout for gaps in my own game.

I understand that a lot of the stat analysis is more applicable for the ring games. For the tournaments you are basically tracking ROI, in the money finishes, and using it to review play of hands.

I guess my question really is, how many sit n gos do I need to play in order to have a sample size that accurately reflects my actual expected return at a given level?

Any less than 200 is prone to huge swings in ROI%. You still get 5% swings in <10 buyins at 400. I think you start to get an idea around 200 but need 500+ to start drawing long-term conclusions.

I've got 201 $55 10 person SnGs tracked ROI is currently 22.6%

at 191 it was 27.6%

at 181 it was 17.5%

Big swings.

Thank you, that's exactly the info I was looking for-- just to clarify what to you mean by "less than 10 buyins at 400" ?

I'm pretty sure he means (correct me if I'm wrong, rex) that even after 400 games, your ROI can still swing +/- %5 within 10 games.

Spot on

Got it, thanks. I just started using PT (love it) so I'm just getting the handle on stuff like this.