Winrates, bankrolls, and finances

$41/hour is better than most people’s 2/5 WRs. Good job!

Are there bigger games available to you?

Open size alone doesn’t really mean the game plays like a bigger game. Bigger open sizes just means the game will play shallower.

1/2 and 1/3 are notoriously low aggression games compared to 2/5 (not saying that 2/5 can’t ever be low aggression, it just typically has more). When a player is betting big on later streets, most of the 1/3 player pool will have a big hand. That starts to change when you start going up to 2/5 and bigger. More players at bigger games will be less afraid to run multi-street bluffs or make large dollar bluffs, so big bet doesn’t always equate to big hand.

More players in bigger games will also value bet thinner. It’s not uncommon for a 1/3 player to check a clean river with top pair good kicker when last to act because many 1/3 players are showdown monkeys. They can’t handle betting on the river, getting raised and then calling it off and losing more money so they just stop betting on rivers to avoid the situation all together unless they have extremely strong hands. Hell, some won’t bet extremely strong hands if a back door nut hand appears, even if it’s basically impossible for someone to have the specific holding required. They’ll just shrug and say “well 85 is the nuts and I can’t beat that” when the board is AK7[4][6] and they have pocket Aces and bet big preflop, on flop and turn. At 2/5 and higher, more players will value bet wider. It’s not unheard of to see someone make a river value bet with hands that are 2nd or 3rd pair.

Anyway, your questions… if losing that 2k doesn’t change your life one bit, I would play 1/3 until you get like 4k and then move to 2/5. Honestly, if it were me, a person who is comfortable at playing 2/5, I might even just start at 2/5 and skip 1/2 and 1/3 all together. 1/2 and 1/3 are rake traps and they are difficult to beat long term. Typically rooms will drop the same max $ amount for rake regardless of 1/2, 1/3, or 2/5, so you want to get to $5 blind level as quickly as possible because the rake will be a smaller % of the pot sizes.

As far as the raise size, I don’t play 1/2 really ever anymore, they stopped spreading it in all but 1 casino near me, so idk what the average raise size is. I would guess $10, but that’s a guess. I play 1/3 ($500 cap) when I’m waiting for a bigger game, most open sizes tend to be $12 or $15. Very rarely do people go smaller. Often people will go bigger to “protect their hand”, which just telegraphs their hand strength. I would pick a size when you sit down and go with it and vary when fish are left to act behind you.

Good luck!

Thank you!

The only larger games available to me would be things like 20/40 or 40/80 Limit Hold’em, which I avoid because I simply haven’t studied LHE and would surely get run over. (I also doubt I could handle the variance.)

I live in Minnesota, which has a state law limiting the size of poker bets to $100. So even the $1-$2 game I play isn’t pure “no-limit”—if I bet $40 on the River and you have the nuts, you can’t raise all-in, the most you can raise to is $140.

So there is no $2-$5 game I can move up to—they don’t exist here.

Thanks a lot this was really informative, I appreciate it!

Hello,

If we say 7bb is attainable at 2/5 in a 100bb game. What do you think is possible in a 300bb game of $1500?

Bonus Question

Do you think you would make more money taking that $1500 and playing 5/10 with a 150bb stack?

Lets say the table conditions are pretty similar. But the 5/10 game has two other regs of a higher caliber.

Depends on the game and the open sizes.

For example some 1/3 games are better than 2/5 games.

Over a large sample if the players were the exact same you would make more at the 5/10 because the pots would get bigger quicker. A 7bb win rate at 2/5 is nothing too spectacular though, and you probably have some leaks if you aren't pulling 10bb+ an hour over a large sample even at 100bb live poker.

I've known some crushers who making 12bb+ for a full year before moving up. One guy was up to $100 an hour at 200bb 2/5 before moving up (i'm pretty sure he was on a heater for the whole year) but it's quite possible to really crush live players if you get good tables with a lot of action and poor play.

A lot of these players are short lived for the game. They make a lot of money and get tired of playing the same stakes and will eventually move up to where they only play once in a while (big easy games don't run as often) or they quit and do other things with their life. It's very rare to find a massive crusher who just wants to play poker all day in and out and not enjoy the windfall of money.

Thanks. That is a helpful way of thinking of it.

I had a coach tell me the 10bb per 100 thing is likely a myth. Simply because no one really ever obtains a long enough sample size to really tell playing live. That really has me wondering how to ever really tell its time to try higher limits. Once you understand the framework and have the bankroll, perhaps its best not to waste too much time trying to build a large sample size like you would online.

I dont think there's anybody making more than $50/hr @ 2/5 over a meaningful sample (5000+ hours) regardless of how deep. I know plenty of guys who bragged about making 30-40k in a single month at 2/5 with 200BB max buy, and sure enough when I watched them play they just ran pure no matter what they did. These were also followed with 10k losing sessions on occasion though (guess 3betting 82o from MP is not longterm profitable), hence all things balance in the end.

I definitely think that effective stack sizes will affect winrates by a lot. I said effective stack sizes because the structure of the game might be 300bb or no max, but most players in the player pool might try to buy in semi-shallow or shallow.

You can win much bigger pots when cooler situations go your way. If you are a crusher who understands theory and exploits in your player pool, you also have a lot of stack behind to put pressure with big bluffs on people in capped range spots that would just be give ups in a shallow structure.

Basically, winrate should go up by a lot in deep stacked structures.

As far as 5/10 1.5k cap versus 2/5 1.5k cap, winrates between the two structures depend on some different variables.

Does most of your winrate come from coolering fishes and not much from out playing regs in deep stack spots? Are the fishes buying in relatively shallow compared to the cap? Etc.

Hard to say what the different winrates will be between 2/5 1.5k cap and 5/10 1.5k cap unless you break down all the variables.

With all that said, there are a lot of ways to increase your winrate if you have a good work ethic (study hard) and/or good common sense.

I would say that many posters in this forum would be surprised at the winrates possible for the top crushers if they actually had honest conversations with those top crushers.

Basically, you can win a ton of money in live poker (way more than 90% of the live "pros" make) in a good player pool if you really want to put the effort to win the maximum.

The coach with whom you talked is definitely wrong about the top winrates possible.

10 bbs/100 hands dealt is only about $50 profit at 2/5 live per 3 hours. That's an hourly of $15-$20. Maybe he meant to say $50/hour being a myth at 2/5 300bb cap. Even if he meant that, I think he is seriously underestimating the top winrates possible.

I beg to disagree.

Maybe you have not met someone who is that good to win WAY MORE than $50/hour at deep stacked 2/5, but it doesn't mean that they don't exist. Top crushers (maybe 1% of "live pros") could and would destroy deep stacked live NLHE tables for enormous winrates.

With that said, top crushers typically get bored of 2/5 deep stack and move up to higher stakes games.

I had a heated debate with an online pro who argued that achieving 40bb/100 hands (~10bb/hour) is unrealistic. He claimed there was something fundamentally wrong with those numbers, suggesting that to reach such a rate, you would need to play at tables where all 8 opponents are giant whales. He insisted that it's simply not feasible.

He even doubted the possibility of making 5bb/hour, as that would mean achieving 20bb/100 hands, a figure he believes is unattainable even at the NL2 stakes.

Sounds like he has never played live poker.

I quit tracking for a long while when it lost purpose, but I started again in September as a prop bet. Got 600 hours before other commitments took over.

In 1/3 $500, I was just over 22bb/hr and this was mainly 2-8pm weekdays, about 3:1 weekday to weekend ratio. Needless to say, I am very good against regs, in fact, Thursday to Saturday are my worst with 10bb/hr.

Yes, and more than that is average session buy-in amount, or I guess in casino term, coin-in per session. If there are bunch of players that can afford to lose $1,000 per session, the game would have a pretty high ceiling for WR.

There aren’t too many areas that can sustain such player pool, hence the perception of WR ceiling in general is usually less than 10bb/hr.

Prop bets are funny like that. In my player pool, there was a reg who made a side bet with his friend that he could win 100k in a month of poker during the holiday season (Christmas 2023 into the New Year 2024).

The reg ended up winning the side bet by hitting the 100k profit mark with more than 1 week left to go for the side bet.

He was playing a ton of hours and mostly graveyard shift when the games were the juiciest. He also was playing certain people heads-up for big stakes.

The funny thing is that this reg is actually not a pro. He has a very demanding job, but he had some free time off work during the holidays to put in the hours.

Also sounds like he has never played 2NL

Pretty amazing player pool to be able to do that.

Yeah, the player pool was pretty good for a long time. According to the regs here, it has been hopping over here at the Gardens in the LA area ever since post-COVID. Bounty games (win 2+ pots in a row to collect $25 bonus from everyone else at table) that started running 2 years specifically drove a lot of action.

At one point, there were 3-5 bounty games running on any given day. Now during WSOP so far, it has died down to only 1 bounty game running consistently on a given day with the occasional 2nd bounty game starting and then breaking.

Perhaps it isn't just WSOP. Maybe the player pool has been permanently wiped out by big losses.

Here's how I see it. Whatever winrates you see people have obtained live, you have to be cautious because sample sizes are small. Like, if a poker pro has achieved 20BB per hour over the course of the year, that's equivalent to 45,000 or 60,000 hands. While the pro is profitable, there's probably still a decent chunk of variance influencing his winrate.

The other thing going with probability is that when you think of an outlier event, like "someone is beating the game for an extreme amount over a decent sample because of luck not skill" the chances of happening to a particular player are very small. But when you look at the chances of this happening in a sizeable player pool, they are very high! Some people are going to get hit by the deck while others will get crashed. It is more likely that the people getting hit by the deck will brag about it while the people getting crashed by the deck will suffer in silence, especially since it's near impossible to understand how much you get lucky or unlucky in live poker. So, the probability is very high you will see or hear some people claiming insane winrates without those being a true reflection of their ability.

Overall since it's impossible to use statistics to measure various aspects of the game the way we do for online poker, it's more likely for bs ideas to become prevalent.

Personally, I have played a good deal of online. Even in micro stakes, you don't see people beating the game for 33BB/100 which is the equivalent of 10BB per hour claimed for live poker. Even if you see such people and this is a true reflection of their ability, they are few and between not the norm.

Live poker is a weird beast. If you play 2/5 with a $1000 BI, nominally you are playing 200BB deep. But with the preflop raises being 4x and 5x, I prefer viewing such a setup as a 5/10 game with 2x or 2.5x raises. Looking at online winrates, I can see how one can beat an equivalent micro stake for 15-20BB/100.

So if you are beating a 5/10 live game for 15-20BB/100, that's equivalent to 4.5-6BB per hour. Since the game is nominally 2/5, those winrates double and that's how you get to the standard of 9-12BB per hour.

So while I can see how such a winrate can be achievable in live games, my default attitude is to be skeptical of most bullish claims being made about achievable winrates.

OK let me give you a hand history just to give you an idea of how big games can play and how big mistakes can be...

Big winning pro opens $120 at 5/5/10/20 with bounty on the CO. Tilted whale calls from the 20.

Heads-up Flop: QcTc3x. Whale donks $300. Pro raises all in for the whale's remaining $925 or so. Whale obviously gets frustrated and then spite calls. Turn 2x. River 4x.

Whale shows 9c7x for 9 high airball. Pro flashed 87cc for a busted 8-high FD and gives the whale a fist bump. Whale scoops the lot with a huge grin on his face and no longer mega tilting.

Basically, if you add side bets to a NLHE game in the form of bounty, 72 game, stand up game, etc...

Winrates can be huge. Besides the standup game, I have never seen people mega tilt as hard as I see them tilt in the Gardens bounty game. Standup game is pure chaos for tilt, and I refuse to play that stuff because my mental game isn't strong enough.

Yeah, this doesn't prove anything. There are also whales online and you can see similar hand histories online as well.

My point is not about online versus live. I just meant that game conditions can be altered to spice up the game.

Side bets that cause big pots and therefore tilt can be crack for a NLHE game. I definitely think that huge winrates are possible if you can get the table gambling.

Pretty normal for people to be skeptical of any claim of WR above 10bb/hr. I had felt the same for pretty much my entire poker career prior to covid. For the longest time, I was pretty certain I had the game figured out - and I had over 10k posts in this subforum over the span of 10 years.

I was wrong, very wrong.

FWIW, the biggest variable for one’s WR ceiling IMO comes down to player pool. You can have god mode and can’t win 15bb/hr if your opponents don’t have the money to lose.