Upcoming Atlantic City Trip!

I'm heading to Atlantic City in about a month for a weekend. 8 guys, 2 motel rooms, all amateurs. To bone up for that, I've started single tabling cash games at NL10 for an hour or two a day. With all that I read about the necessary volume and good sample sizes, my 60-120 hands a day really don't seem like much. From what I've read on the 2+2 forums, 20k hands or so is when you start getting to a good sample size. At my current rate, let's say I average 100 hands/day, I won't hit that for almost 7 months lol. For the 600 hands I've played so far, though, things have gone my way. I've closed a lot of leaks, the largest of which was not knowing when to fold overpairs like AA or TPTK postflop; that always used to unnecessarily cost me around half a buy-in or more when I called down. Cutting that mistake out, combined with a lot of postflop play that I picked up from HUSNGs, has made me a much, much better player. On the 5-6 tables I've sat down at so far, I definitely felt like I had an edge on most if not all of the other players sitting with me... but again, I haven't played too many games, so I can't be sure that I'm a winner. Caution's always a good thing where gambling's concerned.

Back to the AC bit (yes, my cash game discussion did have a point), the notion of small sample size even when playing online for an hour or two worries me a bit. The AC tables are extremely high variance... they tend to play much, much worse but bet much, much higher with marginal holdings, giving a better return for more risk (the risk is when they actually have something or if they draw out on you). Over a small sample size, it's pretty likely that I'll be going through some swings in the hundreds of dollars playing the $1-$2 games. Also, with how slow live games are compared to online, I wonder how my psyche will stand up to any bad beats that happen early. While I'm definitely life-rolled for the $1-$2 game, I don't think I want to risk more than 4 buy-ins on this trip. Only time will tell if that turns out to be a good decision or not.

As far as HUSNGs I'll be taking a break from them for now; it's full ring cash game for my daily hobby.