How to Calculate your Win Rate in Cash Games
How to Calculate your Win Rate in Cash Games
In all walks of life it is important to monitor your progress and how successfully that you’re churning a profit.
When you play online poker a lot of the time you can feel like you are on a massive winning or losing session. But when you take the time to study your stats and monthly profits than you might realise that things are much different to what you thought.
An obvious example of how the human mind processes results in online poker is bad beats. You will always remember your worst bad beats in online poker better than your lucky wins. It’s like a stain at the back of your mind, with a personal vengeance to “do over” that opponent who sucked out on you. Losing your TPTK after stacking off all-in on the flop to a running flush on the turn and river is unforgettable. It’s very important to look at the overall situation however, since luck in online poker tends to have an acute way of balancing itself out.
Calculating your bb/hr and bb/100 Win-Rate in Cash Games
The most natural method to your calculate your win-rate and profitability in cash games is to calculate how many big blinds that you are winning per hour or per 100 hands.
Most advanced online poker players will already be using live tracking software such as Holdem Manager or Poker Office that automatically calculate your bb/hr and bb/100 for you. These tools calculate your win-rate in the form of states and graphs and also allow you to analyse different sessions – a neat feature if I may say so.
Your bb/hr statistic shows you how successful you are playing at your current level. The beauty of calculating your big blind win rate, as opposed to working out how much money that you are making overall, is that it is contextual and universal. You can apply the same method for calculating your profits across the micro-stakes games up to the high stakes $500/$1,000 ring games at Full Tilt Poker.
Your aim in online poker should be to achieve a win-rate of around 7bb/100 per table. Give or take some, this is the minimum that you should be earning before you move up the stakes to increase your profits even more.
If we agree that it’s possible to play around 60 hands per hour in full ring games or 80 hands per hour in short-handed games (6 max) than it gives us a means of converting our bb/100 win-rate into bb/hr. For example, if we’re earning 10bb/100 in a short-handed game at Carbon Poker than we can convert this into around 8bb/hr.
The advantage of using the bb/hr profit method is that it allows us to work out our daily, weekly or monthly win-rate. All of this information can be further extrapolated in order to calculate how quickly it will take us to double our existing poker bankroll.
For example, if we earn 5bb/hr and play for 5 hours per day, than we will earn 25bb per day. If we need to double our total bankroll of 2,000 big blinds in order to move up the stakes than it will take us 2,000/25 = 80 days to double our bankroll. This is the same as doubling a $100 bankroll up to $200 or a $1,000 bankroll up to $2,000.
This poker strategy article was written by the owners of Spread Betting Platforms.
