# of hands to look at stats

What is a good number of hands to be able to draw any conclusions from your stats?

Ive recently been grinding the .05/.10 cash tables (4 at a time). I just started a few days ago and have around 2,500 hands played. With work and familiy I cant play many more.

What # of hands will be a good reflect of my game?

I think at best you can begin to get a feel at this point, but I would caution you against making any changes to your game here. Unless you are losing badly.

2500 hands, 4 tables, took you what? Less than a week, or maybe only a day. There will be many more than a few players who will do 2500 hands a day.

You will want a # of hands that spans not only a growing number of hands, but a growing amount of time. You want to be able to observe results that cross multiple variables in your play.

Variables will include daily mood swings, week mood swings, and the variances of the cards and how you react to how they fall.

10,000 hands would be better, and 50K better still.

2500 hands is not a enough to call it a good sample size. The more hands the better. A small sample would be 10,000 hands. 50,000 or 100,000 would be much better.

It also depends on what stats you're looking at. Some stats like VPIP/PFR and cbet converge very quickly. For instance, you can often reasonably infer from a relatively small sample (I'd say even a few dozen hands, certainly a couple hundred) whether you're playing too tight/loose pre-flop, or too passive post-flop.

Other stats like steal stats by position and 3bet/4bet stats take a lot of hands to converge because the opportunity for those stats to actually be counted arise much less frequently than stats like VPIP/PFR which are counted for every pot you enter outside of checking the BB, or for AF which is calculated based on how much you call/raise/fold post-flop.

So yes, to get a more complete picture of your stats, you need tens of thousands of hands. But for basic leakfinding around things like starting hands and basic aggressiveness, you can get started working on things with much fewer stats.