[somenameforme]

10,000 hands in poker is nowhere even close enough to get a significant sample, unless you're playing extremely weak players where you just have a girnomous edge. But those sort of games are very uncommon. There were plenty of instances of strong, winning players going through swings that lasted hundreds of thousands of hands. A more reasonable baseline sample would be ~500,000 hands.

Frustrating is definitely a great way to describe the game, and emotionally crushing. Like imagine one is playing a 5/10 no limit hold'em game - so people are generally buying in for about $1000, unless they're from Spain. An extremely good player might have a longterm winrate of around 3bb/100 there. In 100 hands, there's every chance you'll be involved multiple pots, easily for thousands of dollars. And your long-term expectation is about $30 out of all of that. So you'll go through short term swings where you're up tens of thousands of dollars in very short periods of time, swings where you're down tens of thousands of dollars - all to get your $30 per 100. And you never become completely numb to the money, even after playing millions of hands.

[quickthrower2]

You are probably right. I could have misremembered the number of hands, the main point is it is alot more than most think. One to ten games of soccer is enough to tell roughly how good someone is, by comparison.