Yesterday, Randy “Nanonoko” Lew set the Guinness World Record for most online poker hands played in eight hours. He ended up playing 23,493 hands in eight hours, and made a $7.65 profit when everything was said and done. Based purely on the fact that Lew was playing 2,936 hands per hour, you’d have to say that this is a very impressive record.

Interestingly enough, there are still people in the poker community (mainly the TwoPlusTwo forum) ripping on Nanonoko’s record, and saying that it’s not impressive at all. Their main gripe is that he only beat the old record for most online poker hands played by a single hand. Furthermore, they think that his $7.65 profit isn’t anything to brag about either.

But one point worth making here is that this record wasn’t about how much money Lew could make in the eight-hour span; instead, it was only about how many poker hands he could play in the allotted amount of time. And you also have to factor in that Lew was sometimes playing up to 40 tables simultaneously, which is something few people in the world could do profitably at any level.

Now if there is one flaw in the record, it’s that Lew and others can simply reach a certain profit, and keep folding just to get hands in. However, you have to be up quite a bit of money to do this, which Lew wasn’t since he fell behind by $1,200 at one point.

Basically, the only true argument against Lew’s record is that the “how many online poker hands you can play” record is flawed to begin with. After all, playing tons of hands in a certain amount of time leads to quite a bit of sloppy play and folding. Perhaps a better record for Lew to attempt would be how much profit he could make at a certain limit while multi-tabling 24 tables.

In any case, this isn’t to criticize Nanonoko the player because he merely set out to break a record – which he did. So hats off to Lew!