Calculating Win-Rate in Cash Games
Your win rate in online poker is a measurement for how much profit that your making in your games.
Why is Calculating your Win Rate Important?
As you start playing online poker semi-professionally, it’ll become extremely important to keep an eye on your win rate and sessions. This might be down to several reasons: you might think that you’re a super star when in reality you’re barely breaking even; you might be having poor sessions in certain games; or lastly, you might be losing a ton of money and not realising it!
If you’re aiming to build up your poker bankroll to a certain level or move up the stakes, you can also use your current win-rate to time how long it will take you to get there. Read this article on “how long does it take to build a poker bankroll”.
How to Calculate Your Win Rate in Cash Games
There are two ways to calculate your win rate in cash games: bb/hr or bb/100.
The bb/hr means how many big blinds that you are winning every hour per table. The bb/100 means how many big blinds that you are winning per 100 hands. Both of these methods are used in forums and online poker communities as a measurement of how well you’re doing at your stakes.
Win Rate Tips:
- The average player plays 85 hands per hour in 6-max games. You can then work out your bb/hr figure by taking 85% of bb/100.
- The average player plays 60 hands per hour in full-ring cash games. You can then work out your bb/hr figure by taking 60% of bb/100.
For example, if you’re bb/100 if 10 bb/100 than you’ll be making 6bb/hr in full ring games.
What is a Good Win Rate in Cash Games?
First of all, if you’re win rate is 0 bb/hr than it means that you’re breaking-even in your games. Although you’re not technically losing money you are probably playing with huge flaws in your game.
- 1-4 bb/100: This is quite good and you should feel happy with yourself with this sort of win-rate especially in the NL50+ games.
- 5-9 bb/100: This is fantastic and quite frankly you can’t expect to do any better.
- 10+ bb/100: This isn’t realistic, although some players might make this over a short-space of time if they’re on a good run.
Calculating Your Daily/Weekly and Monthly Win Rate
Using your bb/hr win-rate you can easily extrapolate those figures to work out how much you make per day, week or even month.
For example, if you make 4bb/hr on average and play 7 hours per day, 5 days a week than you will be making 140 big blinds per week. If this was at $1/$2 than that would be $280 per week in winnings.
If you’re multi-tabling than this figure will be much higher. However, you have to bear in mind that if you start multi-tabling, your bb/100 will decrease yet your bb/hr will increase. This is because less focus and concentration on each table means that you can’t play as many hands when multi-tabling – but the total monetary value of playing this way will lead to more profit.