How long until variance can be negated?

[nutbag]

I realize you never really can completely escape from variance, but recent conversations with the fiance about my future plans have started some arguements. So, we talked about how long it would take before I could prove myself at a limit.

I play limit 6max as my money making game, and most people think that it increases variance playing six max, but i personally think it has only a little jump(sure, you're playing more hands, but also many less hands are there to beat a strong hand on the flop, hit a flush, etc.) I could definately be wrong on this though.

That's beside the point though, what i want to know is how many hands do you guys think should be completed before you can negate the effects of variance? Or is there some sort of mathematical formula for this?

[Talking Poker]

My best guess: 100,000 hands.

I can say for sure that 10,000 hands isn't enough, becauese looking at groups of 10,000 hands I've played (at the same game), I see vastly different results. I don't have a big enough sample size to say if my 100,000 hand chunks will be the same, but I think that's a good estimate.

I suppose 50k hands might be enough... I guess it depends on your definition of "negated."

Do yourself a favor and throw your sessions into Excel and graph them. Hands on the X Axis and $ on the Y. Then throw in a trend line, and if you really want to get fancy, figure out your $(or BB for multiple limits)/hand average and graph that too. The first graph should show a nice upward slope. The second one will have a lot of variance to it in the beginning, but over time, it will level off. When it's barely moving at all over groups of 1000s of hands, IMO you've reached the long run - or have at least mostly negated variance. It's hard to say, but for me, that number seems to be somewhere around 35k hands. It still moves after that, but only about a 3 cent per hand max swing over the course of thousands of hands. Sounds like negated variance to me.

[PShabi]

20k is definitely not enough, and that's what I posted a while back. 40k isn't going to be either.