I agree with a lot of this. And I wonder if it's a coincidence that once I changed my expectations to be more realistic, my results have improved. I'm not treating everyone as incompetant and expecting to stack them every hand.

I also wonder that since more player are playing a similar type multi-table strategy now, whether the best move is to cut down and play less tables in order to get a better read on players and try to develop a type of play that plays the players more often now.

I could be wrong, but maybe a set mining type ot style is less effective now because more players know how to defend against it and have the ability to fold big hands (overpairs).

lol, so did you get married on the set of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon?

No. I'm saying that 100k hands is too small to determine someone's real win rate. I'm not saying that it's too small to determine whether or not someone is a winning player or not.

Also, 300k hands will basically give you a good enough picture of your real winrate - and I'm sure there are a lot of people who get that amount of hands in a year (and many in only a few months).

Of course you need to look at your standard deviation over x hands with y winrate and work out the range of which your true winrate but you need a large sample to shorten this range.

Edit: There is no denying that luck plays an enormous part in poker for the large majority of players. For every player that comes and goes and plays <10k hands in their lifetime, luck will generally determine whether or not that person is a winner or loser in the game.

What about people that play live more than online? They'll never see that many hands. I wonder how many hands someone like Doyle has seen. Is it possible that many of them haven't played enough hands in their life to over-run the luck factor. I'd have no idea how to even guess how many hands live players play in a year.