Bart Hanson says play at least 2/5 to reduce the effect of rake

Search in Thread

Posted any time
Posted past hour
Posted past 24 hours
Posted past week
Posted past month
Posted past year
123

4

123

4

Back to Live No-Limit Hold’em Cash
Back to Live No-Limit Hold’em Cash

Bart Hanson says play at least 2/5 to reduce the effect of rake

deuceblocker avatar
OP
4494 posts · member since Apr 2019
11mo ago

However, you can raise almost the same size at 1/3 as 2/5, and generally get more callers, and 3! less often. You genera

24 July 2025 at 05:40 PM
Reply...

75 Replies

Search in Thread

Posted any time
Posted past hour
Posted past 24 hours
Posted past week
Posted past month
Posted past year
123

4

123

4

Earlier posts are available on our legacy forum HERE
RaiseAnnounced avatar
1216 posts · member since Jan 2016
10mo ago
by submersible

im generally extremely extremely skeptical of claims of live winrates. anyone who wins at a solid clip has absolutely no incentive to share results. live winrates get even murkier as they really are just the honor system (you just enter numbers into an app lol).

I had a fun lil example of reporting bias recently:

I just build a new PC, and I played a session while I transferred files over so that one session isn't currently in my H2N database. I just happened to win 2BIs that session, so you know damn-well it's gonna niggle at me until I can get the old PC set back up and transfer that one session over.

If I had lost 2BIs, I *maybe* would have put it on my mile-long to-do list for posterity reasons, but it would never realistically get done.

This is a pretty exceptional case for online poker where every hand is automatically tracked down to the penny, whether you like it or not. Even with the best of intentions, self-report data is inevitably rife with unconscious decisions like these that are so small you don't even realize you made a decision.

If you add in any reason to question the intentions or incentives, then the data becomes meaningless.

Reply...

About OP

deuceblocker avatar
deuceblocker
Pooh-Bah

Top Posts

RaiseAnnounced avatarRaiseAnnounced
11mo ago
by Joe-exotic69

Three key pieces of advice:

Don’t overestimate your edge.

Don’t underestimate your opponents’.

Table select, table select, table select.

I tanked on this post for weeks because on the one hand it’s obviously, inarguably correct on the merits, but from a mindset perspective it’s kind of the exact opposite of what I see exhibited in all of the successful "Quit their jobs and never looked back" types.

So lemme re-work these:

1) "Don't overestimate your edge."

I'd change this to "Be constantly aware and humbled about how many gaps there still are in your game and how relatively mediocre you are compared to what’s possible."

But I WOULDN'T underestimate how big your edge COULD (should?) be.

2) "Don't underestimate your opponents."

I'd change this to "Just ‘cause someone’s doing something weird doesn’t mean they’re doing something bad."

Or better yet, "Just because someone’s doing something bad doesn’t mean you’re exploiting it."

Or better better yet, "Just because you’re exploiting someone bad doesn’t mean you’re max exploiting someone bad."

Recognizing that the lineup of any 2/5 game in the country is trash isn’t about ego; if you’re combining this with #1, then you’re constantly looking for ways to improve against every player type. (If anything, the fishier the opponent, the harder they are to max exploit, so the more you need to study!)

3) "Table select, table select, table select."

This is the one I struggled with the most, but I’ll put it like this: IME successful players make certain macro decisions to maximize their winrate. Playing live poker is already the best possible macro table selection/player pool decision you can make, so top marks to everyone in this sub.

But if your analysis of a big hand is “I wouldn’t’ve been in that spot in the first place if only I’d been rewarded my seat change earlier”, then that’s just laziness and cope.

In my personal experience, successful players aren’t playing on the fishy sites with terrible software or seat hopping or playing 2/5 because the 5/T lineup is too tough that day, etc.

Admittedly my experience is skewed based on the waters I swim in, and there are probably as many people who make a living off of playing the worst fields as there are ones who are successful off of being good. Going back to the macro decisions, if you actually DIFFERENTIATE yourself, either through the luck of disposable income or celebrite or preexisting network, or through the motivation and rizz to boostrap your way into incredible games, then sure, you can make a living just flopping sets and vbetting whales.

But if that’s what you see for yourself, you’re gonna need a better 5-year plan than rolling up in an unwashed hoodie to a casino in a flyover city and putting your headphones in to min-tip the service. If you’re obsessing with finding the best seat at the best table at Hard Rock Kansas City, then you’re thinking too micro.

Whenever I’ve seen players toil away at the same game for years only to suddenly hit their escape velocity, it’s generally because they got good. Apart from personal financial insecurity and gambling addiction study can solve all problems*. Get good enough and, not only can you play anywhere at any time, you can pretty quickly build up a roll for whatever stakes, stop selling action, etc. If you’re eking out a 20bb/100 winrate PRE-rake, then the first 15bbs is going to the casino; every 1bb better you get beyond that goes straight to the bottom line.

*Yes, even mental game (beyond literal addiction, mental health struggles, etc) is really just running the last mile IMO. If you’re being honest, did you really lose your cool in those hands that are nagging at you, or did you just have no framework for making a rational decision, so you just fell back on habits? (Not even necessarily “bad habits”, you just kinda played your game, which isn’t necessarily any worse than doing the opposite thing more than you should.) You can get the whole table’s permission to leave mid-hand and go for a full weekend meditation retreat before making a decision, and you still won’t know which button to click....

RaiseAnnounced avatarRaiseAnnounced
10mo ago

I guess my conclusion is that a population-wide 20bb/hr winrate among any sizable subset of poker professionals would be provable; so much so that the evidence should be prevalent.

So if the only supporting evidence is some cherry picked samples from some cherry picked players, then that's actually in line with a 10bb/hr true winrate with much larger winrates simply being tail end scenarios and statistical noise.

Of course, as always with statistics and particularly with proving a negative, it doesn't definitively disprove true winrates much higher than 10bb/hr among a sub-population. I don't know what the case or evidence for that claim is, but if a strong case can't be made for it, I'm inclined to think it's not true....

RaiseAnnounced avatarRaiseAnnounced
10mo ago
by illiterat

Honestly feel like a bunch of you just make up random numbers for possible winrates ... this isn't chess and you can't 18 table live 2-5.

For what it's worth, the numbers converge over a much smaller sample when measured relative to the winrates we're talking about.

So if you play 10k hands with a std dev of 100, there's a 95% chance of your true winrate being within 20bb/100 +/- of your observed winrate. Obviously online you're probably a 2.5-7.5bb/100 winner, so knowing your winrate is anywhere from -15bb/100 to 25bb/100 is functionally completely meaningless.

If someone has an observed winrate of $100/hr, that's 80bb/100, so there's a less than 2.5% chance their true winrate is lower than 60bb/100. It takes 400 hours to book 10k hands, which is less than 6 months even for a part-time player. So if 80bb/100 is anyone's true winrate, then there's going to be some good evidence floating around that 40bb/100 is, in fact, rookie numbers.

I'm not a big railbird or NVG guy so I don't personally know what kind of winrates people are claiming/proving, but there is this guy who's put up $60/hr over lol 10k hours at 2/5NL: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/303/a... The results do seem to accelerate toward the end, so it's possible he's trending even higher than that. Also he doesn't seem like a huge "I live in the lab" type guy, so I wouldn't be surprised if there's untapped potential to go higher (then again he probably has his own advantages with playing the same games at the same casino for forever).

But even just taking his $60/hr, that's 48bb/100 with a MoE of +/- 4bb ... which I guess is still barely higher than the 10bb/hr / 40bb/100 "gold standard" lol.

Again, I would be interested to know people's sources for these $100/hr type numbers because what I DO think is an even bigger problem in live poker (or honestly even online poker) isn't just sample size but sample cherry-picking. Either intentionally or unconsciously, people do the poker equivalent of p-hacking where you can slice and dice your sample any number of ways (even the example I posted above has MTT and 5/T+ results that are basically excluded from the analysis 'cause that's just not where the magic happens), and you can basically find some subsample where an anomaly is at play. This activity of finding the filter with the best bb/100 over the largest number of hands, plugging that into Prime Dope is something I've started to call PrimeCoping.

Even just the act of us, as poker information consumers, highlighting the most successful players' winrates are engaged in a version of selection bias.

That's a lot of words (and I probably replied to the wrong post) without coming to a conclusion that's too different from anyone else's. I guess TL;DR: if someone is crushing live poker even over a "small" sample of (say) 10k hands, then they're probably actually a crusher. But if you've heard of 5 guys in all of live poker who has made 80bb/100 over even a large number of hands, that doesn't mean literally 80.00bb/100 is the new standard and everyone needs to get on their level. These are two very different claims to make with different standards of evidence....