It’s ok Joe, I’m sure you can afford it lol
More seriously, your comments about variance are something that I need to take more seriously - it’s amazing how often I think that I have the “midas touch” and then it all turns to … ahem … enough said!
Regards,
TA
I’ll be fine, until I go on tilt and decide to move up to $5/10 to recoup my losses. 
It has been interesting for me too, having HUD data that allows me to track actual performance. I’ve always heard that 100,000 hands are needed for a decent sample, but I thought a few thousand was a pretty good start to see how I was playing. But this experience has shown me how a few all in hands, a few bad turn cards, a few poorly selected bluffs,a few dominated hands, can shift your entire winrate.
Even trying to play pot control abc poker, it’s tough to see how it’s going. Trying to shift to more aggressive high variance poker, I’d say you need even more hands to have a true sense of winrate. I never understood it on replay, maybe because it seemed like everyone plays so face up, I rarely lost more than 3-4 buy ins consecutively. But it is definitely possible to lose 10 buy ins from variance alone, not to mention the large influence of actual skill and tilt.
Here’s an example, over the last 10,000 hands (I’ve actually played 14,000 total) I’ve had AA 55 times (~9 times more often than predicted frequency) and I’m -127 big blinds in those hands while the all-in expected value was +554 big blinds. That shows the variance even over a seemingly large sample.
Yes, actually some HUD statistics, like VPIP, converge very rapidly, and you don’t really need that many hands to start being able to get a sense of ranges.
Yeah, that result with aces is pretty shockingly bad.
This is why you should only look at the all-in adj EV bb/100 stats if you want to know how you are playing vs how you are running. Ignore the variance and focus on the quality of your decisions. Did you get stacks in preflop all 55 times or were there spots postflop where you might have played them sub-optimally? Look through whichever hand history software you are using and review hands. Ideally you should be marking the hands you want to review as your session goes along.
You can beat these stakes easily - not a question about it.
Thanks! I think your question about how I played those aces was rhetorical (great question to think about how to play big pairs), but to give a literal answer: I never once “trapped”, called preflop.
I got all in preflop 6 times (won twice), got a walk or opened (2.5x) and stole blinds 22 times, 3bet/4bet got folds 9 times, got called (either RFI, 3bet, or4bet) and won before showdown 15 times, won a stack at showdown once.
I only lost 3/49 that didn’t get in preflop, once my opponent turned trip kings (lost 38bbs), once folded to a turn overbet jam (lost 14bbs), and got stacked when my top set on the turn gave my opponent Broadway. So, overall not badly played. The only potential problem would be not winning the maximum postflop by causing opponents to fold before showdown.