Introduction
When playing cash game poker, a critical concept to understand is your win rate. Your win rate is essentially the 🌞 average amount of money you win over a set period of time, similar to an hourly wage at a job. 🌞 Moreover, your win rate is the metric in which you can judge your long-term success as a poker player and 🌞 determine how much you can expect to make off playing poker over a long period of time.
Commonly Used Win Rates
In 🌞 online poker, your win rate is usually expressed in bb/100, which is big blinds (bb) per 100 hands. It can 🌞 also be expressed as BB/100, which is big bets (BB) per 100 hands. A big bet is two times the 🌞 big blind and used in limit hold’em. For live poker play, win rates are usually expressed inR$/hour since it is 🌞 difficult to track exactly how many hands you have played in a live session. So to summarize:
bb/100 : Number of 🌞 big blinds (bb) won per every 100 hands.
: Number of big blinds (bb) won per every 100 hands. BB/100 : 🌞 Number of big bets (BB) won per every 100 hands.
: Number of big bets (BB) won per every 100 hands.R$/hour: 🌞 Your hourly rate
The most commonly used win rate that you will encounter in poker tracking programs, such as Hold’em Manager 🌞 and in poker forums, is bb/100, so this is the win rate we will focus on.
How to Calculate Win Rates
To 🌞 calculate your own win rate, I recommend you can track them using automated tools such as Hold’em Manager, Poker Tracker, 🌞 or DriveHUD. Conversely, you can use an Excel Spreadsheet or simply a calculator.
Win Rate = Long Term “Average” Rate
When talking 🌞 about win rates, the term average is crucial here. If you calculate your win rate to be 7bb/100, it does 🌞 not mean that you will win that much every 100 hands, sometimes you will win more and sometimes less, but 🌞 over the long term, you will even out to that figure. Why? Variance.
Sample Size is Important
This brings us to the 🌞 point that you need a large sample size of hands to accurately judge a player’s win rate. How large of 🌞 a sample do you need? Well, there is no one definitive answer to this, but the general poker-playing world can 🌞 agree that around 100k hands are a good starting to estimating a person’s effective win rate. For low-volume playing recreational 🌞 players, 50k hands is potentially a good starting point as well.
What is a Good Win Rate?
What is a good win 🌞 rate? Well, anything above 0bb/100 is good. Why is this? Anything above 0bb/100 means you are a winning poker player. 🌞 A large majority of poker players are losers, and if you are winning over the long run, you should be 🌞 happy. In general, we can make some general assumptions regarding win rates at the micro stakes levels:
1-4bb/100 is a good, 🌞 solid win rate.
is a good, solid win rate. 5-9bb/100 is an exceptional win rate.
is an exceptional win rate. 10+bb/100 is 🌞 absolutely crushing the game.
However, as people move up in stakes, the games get harder because you face many more competent 🌞 players where you have much less of an edge than when playing against fish in the micro stakes. As you 🌞 move up, players are less likely to make costly errors and pay you off lightly as fish do at the 🌞 lowest stakes. Therefore, you should and will see decreased win rates as you progress to the higher stakes. According to 🌞 BlackRain79, an online poker professional and DragTheBar coach, below are the average win rates for people playing 1 to 8 🌞 tables from 2NL up to 100NL. As you can see, average win rates decrease as you move up in stakes:
NL2: 🌞 10bb/100
10bb/100 NL5: 6bb/100
6bb/100 NL10: 4bb/100
4bb/100 NL25: 3bb/100
3bb/100 NL50: 2bb/100
2bb/100 NL100: 2bb/100
Conclusion
Summing up, do not become results-oriented in the short term 🌞 and be obsessed with your session-by-session win rate. Instead, focus on your play and track your win rate over time. 🌞 Once you reach 50-100k hands, you’ll have a good idea of what your effective win rate is. Also, remember that 🌞 anything above 0bb/100 is good because this means you are a winning player!
