Question regarding SH NL sample sizes

[Ravageur]

K, I'm not really sure what I'm trying to say, but I'll try anyway.

What do you figure is an appropriate sample to determine whether you were just on a heater, or just running cold etc...

I'm really trying to determine what my leaks are etc. and if I'm just running cold or had just been running hot. i.e. First 20k hands I ran at 7BB (as per Pokertracker) at 100/200 NL. My last 12k hands I've run at -3BB hand but this has been mostly at 200NL and 400 NL.

Can I take any conclusions from this? How many thousand hands would you say are needed to give yourself an idea of how winning/breakeven/losing a player you are shorthanded where the variance is higher, especially if you play a relatively Lag style of play. (I run at 26/16 6-handed). I've heard stuff from 20to 100k hands.

Thoughts?

[Miffed22001]

12k can be a simple bad run or break even play with a few bad decisions.
How would tightening up for a few k hands effect your winrate do you think. I tend to camp a bit more if i feel im running badly to see if it is that or if im just making one or two bad decsions.

[johnny_fish]

Define winrate (w) ptBB/100, standard deviation (sd) ptBB/100.

Your winrate over 100N hands lies within [w-2*sd/sqrt(N), w+2*sd/sqrt(N)] with 95% probability.

For example, if your winrate is 3 ptBB/100 with a sd of 40 ptBB/100 over 12K hands this range is [-4.3;10.3].

20K hands -> [-2.7, 8.7]
40K -> [-1.0, 7.0]
100K -> [0.5, 5.5]

There are some assumptions to this approximation but it gives you an idea about the huge variance within NL Hold'Em.