North of forty

It's a given that the more hands you play in a tournament, the better your chances are of making the money. It would be neat if there were a magic number of hands which, if you managed to achieve it, would guarantee that you made the money. Of course, there's no such number, but my poker data indicates that there is a number which gives you a high probability of making the money, even though it isn't guaranteed. For the MTTs I play, and the way I play them, that number is forty. Since I started manually recording poker hand data, I've played forty or more hands in three of the nine tournaments I've played, and made the money in all three. For the record, I played 86 hands in Tuesday's tournament. It's good to be north of forty :-)

style flavor    buy_in  entry players entries paid place winnings

MTT   NLHE       44000   6000       9     343   81     5   505000

delta: $455,000
2025 balance: $-673,000
2025 blue distance: $673,000
balance: $15,624,303
MTT NLHE ITM pct: 41.46 (1298 of 3131)