Calculating Win-Rate in Poker
Becoming a profitable TAG poker player is good and everything, but there comes a time when you need to actually start analysing sessions and seeing how good you really are. For all you know, you might not actually be the dog’s bollocks at your level, and if you posted your ROI stats on a forum you might get a smack or stark wake-up call!
So, this is beginner type article introducing how to calculate your win-rate in different forms of poker (cash games/MTTs/SNGs) and I have provided a few average figures that you should look to aim for.
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Cash Games (bb/100)
It has become most common in cash games/ring tables to measure your profits in terms of bb/100. This literally means how many big blinds you pick up for every 100 hands. This is a really simple calculation, and what’s best is that it is scaled to every level. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a micro-stakes fish or a high stakes pro; the bb/100 method and scalar is still the same.
There are of course a few other recondite ways of calculating your win-rate in cash games, such as $/hr or $/100 (how much you win per hr/100 hands). The best thing about calculating your win-rate nowadays is that there are a number of poker software programs that you can use that will do this for you. Personally, I recommend Holdem Manager.
Anyway, a good win-rate in cash games is about 5bb/100. If we estimate that you can play 80 hands per hour in 6-max or 60 hands in 10-man games, then overall that tots up to about 3 or 4bb/hr depending on where you play.
This is the kind of figure you should aim for but in general anything above 0bb/100 means that you’re breaking even (this puts you in the top 15th percentile of online poker players, yay!). There will be a couple of players who’ve managed to achieve a 7bb/100, but I’d go ahead and say that anything above this really isn’t going to be sustainable over the long term. You might hit a few sets and earn 20 buy-ins in a week, but I doubt that you can put this down to your elusive brilliance. As long as you can get to a 4bb-5bb/100 level then I’d say that you’re doing really well. The best thing is that at this level it should only take you a couple of weeks or months before you can move up the stakes and earn double the profits that you’re making now!
MTTs (ROI % & ITM %)
MTTs contain a lot more weekly variance than cash games. A good sample of MTTs is anything above 100 for low field games i.e. less than 200 entrants, and 200-300 for big field event MTTs like the Stars Sunday Million (7,000 entrants).
In MTTs and SNGs, we measure our success by looking at our ROI (return on investment). This is a percentage of your total buy-ins. Your MTT ROI is calculated by taking your total winnings divided by your entry fees x 100 – 100%.
For example, you play 10x$20 MTTs and win $500. MTT ROI = – 100% = 150%.
In terms of what is a good ROI in MTTs, I think that there is some contention on this topic since it can vary a great deal. I mean, if you play 100 $10 MTTs but make a massive winning in something like Full Tilt Poker’s Sunday $750k GTD then your ROI can end up looking like a telephone number. None the less, here are some very basic MTT ROI figures:
0% = Bad
10% = OK
20%+ = Good
30% – 80% = Excellent
80%+ = God-like
ITM % (In the Money) is another useful figure which is used to calculate how often you finish tournaments with a payday on average. If you go by a pro high stakes MTT player like Chris Moorman (best UK MTT player in 2008) then about 16% ITM % is very good.
SNGs (ROI/ITM)
You can calculate your SNG profits using the same ROI/ITM method as in MTTs above. The difference however is that in SNGs there will be much less variance, and you can usually start to see a stable ROI figure within just 20 odd games.
Below are considered some winner’s ROI in SNGs (notice how it is lower for high stakes SNGs because of the tougher fields).
- $11s - 20% ROI
- $20s - 15% ROI
- $33s - 10% ROI
- $55s - 8% ROI
- $109s - 7% ROI
- $215s - 6% ROI