I think part of the confusion about the whole "long run" issue is confusion about what it means and what people want it to mean.
I am guessing from Jean Scott's posts that she feels that somehow "getting into the long run" is some sort of goal, especially the talk abot the N0 long run.
What people are probably more interested in, and are confusing the long run for, is financial stability.
The truth is, for financial stability, getting to the long run is completely irrelevant. If you are disciplined in your play and game selection, then what matters is bankroll, and whether or not you have a sufficient amount of it. It doesn't matter how you reach that state, whether it was playing for 50 million hands, or you just started with the proper bankroll.
The long run numbers that have been talked about are prediction aids. But what they predict are probability distributions of all the possible paths you can go along in the future, but they say nothing about the specific path you will follow.
If you start off in a serious bad run of luck, it will take a lot longer to dig back out of that hole and get back to where you are "starting over", and so it may take a long time to reach financial stability, and if you aren't sufficiently bankrolled, you may have to give up on VP and pursue something else for a while. But on the other hand you could get very lucky right off the start, hit some jackpots, take some parlay shots (normally outside what your bankroll would permit, but you want to test the luck), and hit some even bigger jackpots and suddenly find that you have the money you need to feel comfortable. Neither case has anything to do with reaching the long run, but are specific instances of paths that your future play might take.
Getting into the long run is no guarantee of any particular outcome, the numbers being tossed around just say that by this point, you'll have this % chance of being that % ahead (or behind), but your specific outcome is just one of the many possible outcomes.
This is all useful stuff to look at when trying to guess what shape your future might take, but the reality is that you need to constantly look at where you are, and forget about where that relates to where the numbers say you "should be" by now. No matter what happened in the past, the next hand you play is just the next hand you play, and the machine doesn't care about your history.
Just some food for thought.
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