How many hands do i need to play?

[Rhound50]

I bought poker tracker a couple of weeks ago and I have been tracking my stats closely to see where my leaks might be, one thing i noticed is that I'm not getting big pocket pairs as much as i should I have played close to 3500 hands. By my calculations you should get each pp about one in every 220 hands. I found similar numbers on other resources so I'm pretty sure its right. Anyways according to the number of hands I've played I should have had each pp approximatly 16 times. going through the numbers in poker tracker I have gotten AA 6 times and KK 8 times, QQ 9 times. These numbers are not good for me and are probably part of the reason that I'm stuggling to turn any profit. How many hands is needed to be somewhere close to statistical significance?? Any math people out there that can help me?

[iceman5]

Im going to throw out a number of 20000 hands. This is based soley on my personal experience whenever I start a new database. Im no expert on standard deviation or anything like that.

[Smokin'Al]

If the probability of getting a particular pp is 1/221, and you have 3500 hands

then the mean is obviously 3500/221 = 15.8 hands
and the standard deviation is the square root of 3500*(1/221)*(220/221) = 4.0 hands

So 95% of the time you should have 8 - 24 hands (16 +- 2 standard deviations) of a given pocket pair.

And 68% of the time you should have 12 - 20 hands (16 +- 1 standard deviation) of a given pocket pair.

So you are indeed unlucky (~1/1000?) at the moment in terms of getting dealt AA, KK, QQ.

[EDIT] I make 4BB/hand with AA and KK, and 1BB/hand with QQ, so if you are 10 AA short, 8 KK short, and 7 QQ short, that should have an impact of

(10*4 + 8*4 + 7*1)*100/3500 = 2.25 on your BB/100 hands (BB = 2xbig blinds)

Better luck with the next 3500 hands!

[Rhound50]

Thanks for the math lesson Al, its been a while since I took statistics. =)

[The A Train]

I had exactly the opposite happen Rhound. I had twice as many AA in my first 2000 hands as I should have (I'm not complaining) , however after 3500 hands it's getting back to where it should be (damn). I think iceman is right. Give it time and it will balance out. If my stats are any indication get ready for the rush of AA etc. Enjoy them when they arrive.