Poker Analytics
What is a good win rate in live poker?
"So how much do you make an hour?" It's the question every live player gets asked eventually, and it's a genuinely hard one to answer — not because the maths is complicated, but because a live sample takes years to build. Here's what a good win rate looks like, how to express it, and how much of yours you can reasonably believe yet.
A solid, sustainable live cash win rate is roughly 5 to 10 big blinds an hour. Above 10 BB an hour over a real sample, you're beating your game badly. Elite players sustain 15–20 BB an hour in the right spots — that's a ceiling to admire, not a number to plan a bankroll around.
Three ways of saying the same thing
Most arguments about win rates are really arguments about units. There are three in common use, they all measure the same thing, and each one hides a different part of it.
| Metric | Good for | What it hides |
|---|---|---|
| $/hour | What you actually earn. The number that pays rent. | It's tied to one stake, so you can't compare it across games or against anyone else. |
| BB/hour | The live standard. It travels across stakes and rooms. | Not much, honestly — this is the one to track. |
| BB/100 hands | The online standard, and the only fair way to compare live with online. | It needs a hand count, which live play doesn't hand you unless you record it. |
The gap between the last two is the interesting one. A live table deals roughly 25 to 35 hands an hour. An online table deals 60 to 100, and most online players run several at once. So a live player at 8 BB an hour and an online player at 4 BB/100 are earning broadly comparable rates per hand — the live player just sees far fewer hands to do it in.
What a good live win rate looks like
| BB/hour | Read |
|---|---|
| Below 0 | A losing player, or a winning one inside a perfectly normal downswing. Only the sample size can tell you which — more on that below. |
| 0 – 3 | Beating the rake and not much more. Common in tougher games or where the rake is heavy. |
| 5 – 10 | A solid, sustainable winner at low and mid stakes. |
| 10 – 15 | You're crushing your game. Worth checking the sample is long enough to believe it. |
| 15 – 20 | Elite, and usually as much about game selection as it is about skill. |
These bands are for live cash games, which run softer than their online equivalents — a big part of why live BB rates look so generous next to online ones. They're not tournament numbers either: tournament results get measured in ROI, over samples larger still.
Why your real hourly is probably lower than the one you quote
Most win rates you'll hear are gross, worked out from buy-ins and cash-outs. What you actually take home tends to be smaller, for four reasons that are easy to leave out:
- Breaks. If you time a five-hour session that included forty minutes away from the table, you played four hours and twenty. Counting the break inflates your hours and deflates your rate — or the other way round, if you stop the clock but keep the result.
- Tips. Dealer tokes on every pot you drag are a real, recurring cost, and one that grows with how much you win.
- Travel and table time. The drive, the parking, the hour on the list waiting for a seat. None of it is playing time, all of it is time.
- Trip costs. Flights and hotels for a series turn a modestly winning trip into a losing one more often than you'd expect.
A tracker that separates these out will show you two numbers instead of one. We report an hourly rate with and without breaks, and we keep expenses on their own line, so you can read your results with them and without them.
How long a sample before the number means anything?
For online cash, the usual guidance is around 50,000 hands for a rough estimate, 100,000 for moderate confidence, and 500,000 or more before a win rate is on really firm ground.
Now convert that to live play at 30 hands an hour:
100,000 hands is about 3,300 hours at a live table — more than three years at twenty hours a week. Which means most live players will never put together the kind of sample a statistician would call strong.
That's not an argument against tracking, quite the opposite. It's just a reason not to read a hundred sessions as a final verdict.
Because what a live sample can tell you, long before it settles, is direction and comparison: which room, which stake, which day, which session length is working better than the others. Those differences show up way earlier than an absolute win rate does, and they're usually the ones you can act on anyway.
And if you'd rather see the shape of it than take our word for it, the variance simulator runs your own win rate and standard deviation forward and shows you the downswings a player with your numbers should expect. It's a good reality check before a downswing arrives rather than during one.
How to measure yours
- Record every session, winning or losing. It's the one habit that does most of the work — the number only means something if nothing's missing from it.
- Time the session, and pause for breaks. The gap between gross and net hours moves an hourly rate more than you'd think.
- Note the hand count when you can. It's the only route to BB/100, and the only fair way to compare a live game with an online one.
- Keep expenses separate from results. Tips, travel and buy-in fees belong in your accounting, not buried inside your win rate.
- Compare like with like. One number across every game you've ever played won't tell you much. Filter by stake, room and format, and the useful patterns turn up quickly.
We've been keeping these records for players since 2012. The app reports hourly rate, big blinds per hour, standard deviation and win ratio, and lets you filter any of them by stake, location, format or date range. The free version caps how many sessions you can keep, and Pro removes the cap.
If there's a stat you'd like and we don't have it yet, tell us — a good part of what's in the app is there because someone asked!
Related: are you ready to move up in stakes? and how long should a poker session be?
Find out what your real win rate is.
Track your sessions, your hours and your expenses, and let the numbers settle the argument.
