Winrates, bankrolls, and finances
Venice's Introduction to the Thread.
I make a rule to not change someone's post unless it violates a rule. However this is the exception. Not because APD's post is bad (it is good), but because there's lots of discussion back and forth on winrates, and some people are just looking for a simple answer to winrates and bankrolls.
The simple answer is that winning is good. The majority of people playing poker lose money. Poker is a worse than zero sum game because of rake. Therefore if you are winning, you're doing well.
Harrington wrote that if you are beating a live game for 10BB/hr, you're crushing it. That's $20/hr at 1/2 and $50/hr at 2/5. That doesn't mean that you can't beat it for more, it just means that over time winning that much means you're vastly superior than your opponents. Most people don't sustain that over a long period of time because they move up to win more money.
The second simple answer is to stop worrying about what your sustainable winrate is. In order to get a big enough sample to statistically generate an accurate winrate, you and your opponents have play thousands of hands exactly the same way. Poker doesn't work that way. If you aren't improving your play over that amount of hands, you're falling behind your opponents. Therefore, the results are meaningless.
Finally, Kurt put it best that you need 20 buyins to play a level.
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/78/mic...
On to the rest of the thread.
So here it is... The Win Rate thread (and other finances)!
This thread will basically be a containment thread and will stock pile all of the questions and answers about winrates. I would also like to include bankroll management and other finances into this thread. Bottom line is this, if you are worried about a win rate you should probably be worried about bankroll management also.
Instead of starting this thread like all other winrate threads by asking the question, "What is a good hourly/winrate at live 1/2?" I would rather take the time to explain a few tools live players have to help us with it and to also help us become disciplined. The "whats a good rate" questions I am sure will be asked time and time again.
Online players have some superb tools that they get to use. HUD's, databases, OPR, PTR, Shark Scope, and the list goes on. Live players have one thing, our memory. As we all know the human mind is prone to what is called human error, or in a lot of "winning" poker players cases exaggeration and forgetfullness. I think its important to discuss how we go about keeping track of all this information that will be important to and for our games. So get your pens and pads ready, or phones, and get ready to start logging!
What goes into a winrate? A lot of people simply log the hours played, the amount they bought in for, and the amount they cashed out. At the end they calculate it all together and wala a winrate or, like most live players use, an hourly rate. This is probably the easiest way to do it. When I first started logging my play I would bring a binder with me that kept all my poker "stuff" in it and I would log it into the book at the end of the session. If I had forgotten the binder I would make a quick note in my phone and write it later. I always made it a point to do it right then and there though. Never ever wait! Human error will kick in.
Times have gotten much more advanced though. Live players now have some pretty useful tools that we can use. First one I will talk about is Poker Journal for the Apple fanboys.
Poker Journal by Michael Golden is a program that will track both your live and tournament play (and any game you would like to add to your database) and calculate everything for you. It will give you your hourly rate, time played, average won, average lost, sessions won and lost, and much much more. It will also graph your sessions and run reports for you. You want to know what day or time has been the best to play or what location is the most profitable? Simply filter your stats and its all there. It will also run live cash games. You hit start and the clock goes a ticking. Unfortunately it runs only on the iPhone and iPod at the time and is $12.99.
Next is www.checkyourbets.com. I personally have not used this, but going to the website and looking at some of the screen shots and reading the FAQ it looks pretty solid and its FREE! 😃 Others on here use this site and I will let them add what they feel is appropriate.
Last is cardplayer.com. Their format is very simple yet boring. If you want something quick and easy with not too much detail then its for you. It definately beats a pen, paper and calculator, but I would go with one of the other ones personally.
There are others, but I think those are some pretty good examples. So why go through all this trouble to tell you about these tools? Simple, you want to know what kind of winrate is to be expected then start logging. What I do is not going to be the same as what you do or anybody else does. Not only will you start to learn about winrates at the different levels but you will be able to disect your game and learn many things. It will teach you discipline. When you are making it a point to log each session you will start to treat your poker more like a business and become more serious about it. Also important is to log your expenses. You need to know if you are spending too much and if it is affecting your roll.
Bankroll is another important thing. I think we all can agree that 20 BI's at 1/2is a good starting point, but if you dont want to wait to save up $2k just to play some poker there is nothing wrong with taking shots. In our world (casinos) this is the smallest game offered and we really have no choice. I will leave the bankroll information out for now as there are many different opinions on it.
Last thing I want to add is that this needs to be a place where people compare rates and notes with little to no brags. If you are going to come on here and brag you better have some proof (I gave you some great material above) and many hours to back your claims up. For those that have been wanting to log their sessions now is the time to start. I can see many good self challenges coming out of this and more disciplined players.
Thats it for now. Let the questions begin (and reappear many times).
Hmmm....
1st few hours in January have me concerned that you're actually not a winning player.
Seriously/awesome results, very impressive!
Can you give us some short snippets of advice for great results like this? Thanks for your post.
Just spend a **** load of hours in solver and strive to play theoretically optimally as possible, just mixing in light exploits like overfolding vs nits. Also play/study like an online player until you beat 100nl+. Live players are extremely bad and it's shooting fish in a barrel for any decent online player
Inspiring and motivational thread here. Keep it up!
Last night I went home dejected that I'm playing in a 1/2 game I cannot beat. My cardroom raised their rake to 10 percent up to 60 + up to 3 additional for promotions. The promotions are hard to win because they run at inconvenient times or fill up the room, and there are no seats, or pay out 100,000 just once a year. Add to that a stingy $1 tip to the dealers who work only for tips. Now, when you win a pot with 60, you feel like you paid for a large bowl of soup but got a small one that retails for only 50. I still make plenty of errors. There is lots of room to improve my game. With a degen or whale on the table, I feel like a pro. But when average loose-passives populate the table, and stacks go below 200, it feels like the game is unbeatable. The margin for error just gets too thin, and the variance of multiway pots with all the loose passives is brutal.
For decades, I was lucky to play in games run for tips in warehouses in bad neighborhoods. I was prepared these games would get robbed eventually. Then the casino opened up and killed all the home games. I know the rake is the price you pay for civilized poker in public. My family appreciates now I won't get shot. But if you are priced out of poker, how civilized is the world, really?
Please feel free to write: this question has been covered hundreds of times in the forum.
Very smart and reasonably poker smart but somewhat undisciplined young LAG rec who plays better than most of the local regs did a bet with his non poker buddy whether he could win 100k+ in my player pool in 1 month.
I think the bet motivated him to play his best and to put a lot of volume at the best prime time hours. He is young and single with a demanding job, but he had more time off during the holidays when he started the bet in late December. I definitely suspect that he cut down on the spewy nonsense that he would sometimes do when he would normally get bored because he really wanted to win this bet.
He hit his target in less than 3 weeks and won the bet.
Very smart and reasonably poker smart but somewhat undisciplined young LAG rec who plays better than most of the local regs did a bet with his non poker buddy whether he could win 100k+ in my player pool in 1 month.
I think the bet motivated him to play his best and to put a lot of volume at the best prime time hours. He is young and single with a demanding job, but he had more time off during the holidays when he started the bet in late December. I definitely suspect that he cut down on the spew
3 weeks, 100k? What stake was this
Last night I went home dejected that I'm playing in a 1/2 game I cannot beat. My cardroom raised their rake to 10 percent up to 60 + up to 3 additional for promotions. The promotions are hard to win because they run at inconvenient times or fill up the room, and there are no seats, or pay out 100,000 just once a year. Add to that a stingy $1 tip to the dealers who work only for tips. Now, when you win a pot with 60, you feel like you paid for a large bowl of soup but got a small one that retails
Yeah, $6 + $3 + $1 is fairly brutal for a 1/2 NL game. With shortish stacks (i.e. < $200) and high rake, my guess is a decent strategy to have a shot is outnitting your opponents by playing *extremely* nitty (which is what I do in my $9 + $2 + $1 1/3 NL game).
Ggoodluck!G
The stakes were a combination of:
5/5/10 bounty ($25 bonus from every player to someone who wins 2+ pots in a row) with mandatory $25 single board NLHE bomb pots. Sometimes mandatory straddle to $20.
5/10/20 double bounty ($50 bonus from every player to someone who wins 2+ pots in a row) with mandatory $50 single board NLHE bomb pots. Sometimes mandatory straddle to $40.
It is hard to convert these structures to “vanilla” NLHE structures, but I think say that the stakes were a mix of 10/20 NLHE to 20/40 NLHE essentially.
Where the hell can you play those stakes in a public poker room? I thought the 10-20+ player pool was fleeing to private games.
Sounds like Gardens. If it's one of the young kids I'm thinking of he runs pretty damn pure too. My last couple of LA trips the same 2 kids have gotten it in bad against me multiple times and I have yet to get any money back from those pots.
At 20-40 if he played 12 hours/ day for 21 straight days, its about 10bb/hour, its doable but still very impressive.
Last night I went home dejected that I'm playing in a 1/2 game I cannot beat. My cardroom raised their rake to 10 percent up to 60 + up to 3 additional for promotions. The promotions are hard to win because they run at inconvenient times or fill up the room, and there are no seats, or pay out 100,000 just once a year. Add to that a stingy $1 tip to the dealers who work only for tips. Now, when you win a pot with 60, you feel like you paid for a large bowl of soup but got a small one that retails
What's your bankroll?
If it's >$10k you should be taking shots at the $5 level ASAP
Others have told me that too. Bankroll was up to $3.5K, now down to 2.7. I have about $500 a month cash flow for recreation. To play 2/5, I would want to be rolled closer to 20K. I could take some cash out of my IRA now, paying the penalty. Or wait nine years until I retire. The kid will be done with college, house almost paid off, a large state pension in addition to savings, endless time to play poker.
My low estimate is that my cardroom took from the pots I won about 10K. I'm trying to get an unraked home game started to build up my bankroll.
I’ve just made the decision to quit my (stressful!) full-time job and replace it with a (stress-free!) part-time job, but to supplement the income with poker winnings. I plan on playing about 15 hours a week.
I want to get to a spot where I literally never have to worry about my cash “bankroll,” and every Friday I'll just put that week’s poker winnings into my family’s joint checking account. (Or, on weeks when I lose, the next week’s winnings will go to first replenish the cash bankroll and then
So an UPDATE: while I’m up a bit over $13,000 since I started this in July, the inevitable DOWNSWING has struck, and after yet another two-bullet/$600 losing session yesterday, I am down to just $300 left in my sock drawer.
I don’t know what to do! I wanted to avoid ever having to withdraw money from our checking account, and now that’s exactly what’s happened!
(Complicating all this is that I’ve just had a Round 2 interview for a full-time job, which, if I get it, would allow me to quit poker…So, I don’t know, I might only be needing to play for another couple weeks, maybe I just pray this final $300 bullet can carry me through? But I’m not stupid, I know there’s no way in hell I can play well knowing if I lose I can never play again…that’s how I played as a Degen in my 20s, and I SUCKED!)
So anyway, I don’t know what to do. Why couldn’t I have just tripled up yesterday???
So an UPDATE: while I’m up a bit over $13,000 since I started this in July, the inevitable DOWNSWING has struck, and after yet another two-bullet/$600 losing session yesterday, I am down to just $300 left in my sock drawer.
I don’t know what to do! I wanted to avoid ever having to withdraw money from our checking account, and now that’s exactly what’s happened!
(Complicating all this is that I’ve just had a Round 2 interview for a full-time job, which, if I get it, would allow me to quit poker…So
I here ya Davo. I'm currently on the worst downswing I've had in two years. Played yesterday feeling good like there's no way there is any more 2 outer or running straights that are still to get me. Yet it continues to happen. If there's a card in the deck to save these people's lives their hitting it. Its frustrating and makes you second guess yourself. I wish I had the magic answer for both of us.
Love the fact that Dave-O has sock drawer poker money. I have toque drawer poker money (of course).
Toque drawer always starts at $3K. When it drops below $2K (what I bring to my 1/3 NL game, even though I BI for just $200 and never get remotely close to being in for even half of what I bring), I withdraw from the bank to top back up to $3K. When it gets above $4K, I drop it back down to $3K and deposit the rest in the bank. I have an extremely low variance style, so very rarely am I withdrawing from the bank (would required a $1K "downswing" for me, which is quite rare).
In Dave-O's case, if money is no object, then top up the sock drawer appropriately from bank funds. If money for life is tight and maybe not easily replenishable right now, I wouldn't play poker again until it is. IMO.
Ggoodluck!G
Quick question, what do you think is the best indicator of your true CURRENT winrate?
A. Lets say you play 1000 hours/year
1. The past year (1000 hours)
2. Past 2 years (2000 hours)
3. Past 5 years (5k hours)
4. Your entire poker career no matter how long
B. Same question but for 500 hours/year
Overall, I think the bigger sample size is one that matters the most. Yes, some of those hours could have been put in a decade+ ago in different conditions and might not seem as applicable. But I think overall it is likely a better indicator of a realistic winrate than much smaller sample sizes (even if the smaller sample sizes are in more recent conditions), one that helps outrun (slightly?) the up/down variance in lol smaller samples.
ETA: I mean, my best yearly (lol ~500 hour) sample size is about ~5 times better than my worst. And my cherry picked best ~1000 hour stretch is about ~3 times better than my worst ~1300 hour stretch. So I'm certainly not going to make any assumptions about my "current" winrate based on the last lol 500 / 1000 hours.
G4forboth,imoG
Quick question, what do you think is the best indicator of your true CURRENT winrate?
A. Lets say you play 1000 hours/year
1. The past year (1000 hours)
2. Past 2 years (2000 hours)
3. Past 5 years (5k hours)
4. Your entire poker career no matter how long
B. Same question but for 500 hours/year
for what purpose….financial planning or dick waving? (I don’t mean dick waving in a critical way but can’t think of a less obnoxious form of words)
Quick question, what do you think is the best indicator of your true CURRENT winrate?
A. Lets say you play 1000 hours/year
1. The past year (1000 hours)
2. Past 2 years (2000 hours)
3. Past 5 years (5k hours)
4. Your entire poker career no matter how long
B. Same question but for 500 hours/year
Depends on the person and the stage/level your game is in.
Were you an absolute beginner 2k hrs ago and have spent the last year intensely studying and improving?
Or are you already a crusher who is making incrementally tweaks to their game?
Also the quality of games you've played over the span of hours.
So tough to say really unless you have some more info on these types of variables.
But all things being equal I'd probably lean towards the last 1k hrs being the most reflective. And that could be something as simple as the quality of your games has gotten better/worse, but it's still reflective of your current winrate.
Quick question, what do you think is the best indicator of your true CURRENT winrate?
A. Lets say you play 1000 hours/year
1. The past year (1000 hours)
2. Past 2 years (2000 hours)
3. Past 5 years (5k hours)
4. Your entire poker career no matter how long
B. Same question but for 500 hours/year
Your self-evaluation. Ideally, you would play online where you would have a bigger sample size and have a better idea of what stakes you win and for how much.
FWIW, one way I was convinced that my expected win rate was lower than I wnated it to be was going to pokerdope and doing variance calculations.
However -and that's the interesting part- the thing is my playstyle is constantly changing and the playing conditions also change, so I split my play history in roughly 3-4 periods in which i had different win rates.
So, after I did the pokerdope calculations I went on an unbelievable heater which was followed by a soul-crashing downswing. So, If I go on pokerdope and try to do variance calculations based on the observed win rate of any period of time, there's no assumed overall win rate that can explain the swings that I 've experienced. And that's even after I widen pokerdope's assumptions about standard deviation and such.
So either even pokerdope can underrate the potential swings or alternatively, my game, and thus my expected winrate, changes depending on the approach I take over specific time frames.
