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

Lol at Vegas 2/5s being reg infested. Please.

I made almost $40/hr at 2/3 btw.

I haven't played enough to know but reg infested doesn't mean they are good players....

You'd think there'd be less regs in Vegas than almost anywhere else though due to it being a tourist destination.

Well, there is a much higher percentage of tourists at 1/3 in Vegas.

Isn't a tourist just a reg in a game from another city?

GcluelesspokeropponentnoobG

There are lots of literal tourists in Vegas, who play at the poker games, and are not so good or experienced.

Weird, I always thought the guy sitting down in the tropical shirt / convention suit + tie / "what are we playing?" / "so 2 cards in my hand and 5 community cards?" was a myth, and my *extremely* limited LV hours haven't told me otherwise. As soon as I got talking to anyone, it was very clear they were a reg in a game back home (just as I was).

Gbut,veryfewhoursinLVpoker,socouldeasilybewrongG

When I noticed the rake had increased where I play, this was my thought exactly.

I'm with you on this one GG. Starting a list right now entitled:

"Stereotypes poker players want to believe in order to sit in a game that really isn't that good"

1) Old Guy: Doesn't know what a range is
2) Young Woman: Doesn't understand that players bluff
3) Young Guy: Studies poker 10 hours a day in a lab staffed by a team of Van Neumann's former Phd candidates
4) MAWG: Only 3bets AK/QQ+
5) Guy in tropical shirt: Doesn't understand why he can't trade one of his hold cards for a new one like they do in the movies
6) European: Never has a hand but will still manage to successfully bluff us/suck out if we call him down to the river
7) 40 something with drink in a hand: Thinks he's still playing blackjack

And so on ...

A few days ago, I did some back of the envelope calculations trying to understand how my casino's 6+3 rake structure translates into bb/100.

What I ended up concluding was that once I separated rake from the promo drop (which I mostly get back through high hands and such)* the effective rake was around 15bb/100 at 1/3 and 9bb/100 at 2/5. That's 5bb and 3bb per hour respectively.

My observed win rate at 2/5 is marginally higher than my observed winrate at 1/3. And yet when I add the money I lose to rake, I see that pre-rake I am a bigger winner at 1/3 than at 2/5 which would is what you would expect logically due to the relative softness of the games. In other words, I am a real world example of how rake incentivizes moving up to tougher games.

15bb/100 for rake is no joke. This leads me to once again express my skepticism about the golden standard win rate of 10bb/hour. With rake being 15bb/100 you need to be beating the games at 40-45bb/100 clip pre rake in order to reach 10bb/hour. That's tough no matter how good the games are. It's even tougher when the stacks aren't that deep.

* One underrated trap of the promo drop is that the more you play in graveyard shifts when no promos are running, the higher your effective rake gets. If let's say someone only plays late nights on weekends, his effective rake soars to 22bb/100. People obviously play those times because the winrates are higher, but because of the rake, they aren't as high as they might think.

I'm almost surprised it's that low, although different accounting I guess. My home room is 5+2, and I track rake paid including promo drop and tips. Average for me is $20-$24/hr which at a 1/2 table is 30+ bb/100. That's exclusive of rakeback and promos, but the latter is mostly the BBJ which I guess I could hit someday.

I have a few sessions of 3-6 limit, which is a total donkfest, but that really opened my eyes to the effect of rake there. I ran fairly well, but with being more aggro and winning more, my rake figure shot up to nearly $40/hr which is a huge fraction of what would otherwise be a 10 BB (big bets)/hr gross winrate, which should be too high to consistently be achievable even in a terrible limit game.

Well, you re playing 1/2 and you re including tips, which I didn't. If you take those two factors into account, our numbers get closer.

Well yeah, pre-rake figures are going to look a lot gaudier. 20bb/100 pre-rake is achievable online with 1/3rd as many fish per hand and pros with less glaring leaks.

It seems unsustainable because you're controlling for one of (the biggest?) factors that makes it so.

think live hourly is for the most part near worthless metric

if you want to make more money
1) get better
2) find better games
3) play more

if i had to rank them, 2>>> 1 >>>>>>>>>>>> 3, except in certain situations. however most people are incapable of 2 for a variety of reasons. tbh most people are incapable of 1 as well

would think plo / live mtts / mix are better source of edge than trying to play 2/5 nl unless u live in tiny market. would also not take salesman's advice on how to run your "career". nonetheless he is probably right re rake esp in la

From what I can tell, there is a pretty high potential to make a lot of money ($100+/hour) at live 2/5 NLHE as long as the buyins are deep like 1k for 200 big blinds.

The problem is that most serious 2/5 NLHE players would really need to improve their poker games quite significantly to achieve those potential winrates. And most serious poker players are not serious enough to work that hard on getting better.

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.

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.

I live roughly an hour away from a casino, have an accommodating job/partner, no kids, and fairly often don't do other hobbies so I can play poker. I manage about 400-450 hours a year, in a casino.

That doesn't include travel time (roughly another 100 hours, of not playing but not doing other things), but does include some amount of leaving the table for drinks/food/whatever (I often just track when I start and end).

At the risk of further derailing this thread, I guess I was thinking part time was 15-20hrs a week. Much less than that (without supplementing with online play) ... well it seems like a much better and more fulfilling way to spend your life, so don't change a thing.

During the stretches that I've taken live poker seriously, I've made it work with kids, job, study, etc by carving out a full day to play (11am until the last whale racks up) and then sneaking in another half day somewhere either in the afternoon (~11am til dinner) or night (~6pm 'til last whale racks up), scheduling around the few days a week 5/T is spread during those times. But I guess that's why people say I have "an unsustainable lifestyle" and "a mood disorder" and I "get burnt out and disappear for years at a time."

yeah i dunno man. the 100/hr at 2/5. is it conceptually possible? probably. im sure if you took some of the best players in the world and took away all of their money and forced them to take 2/5 seriously, or i guess if they had a winrate bet would be able to do it. can your average person at the casino get to that point even with coaching / training tools? probably not. i think very few people have what it takes to compete at an elite level at anything. whether its mental blocks, discipline issues, lack of intelligence / focus / empathy, no time, or whatever it might be, i really doubt it. anyone capable of that winrate would either rapidly move up or to other opportunities (other games, getting staked, other markets).

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). my default assumption when people start posting numbers is its wish fulfillment or trying to sell something. sometimes i guess its someone inexperienced on a heater that's looking for egoic validation / impostor syndrome. even the thread referenced by raise announced turned into a guy who basically hasn't been vetted at all selling coaching for 100+ / hr as a result of his post. this forum is also a fairly good ex of this imo, where everyone keeps referencing hands played / these mythical hourlies while being lost in extremely standard spots and not having any idea how to find the answer (hint: software).

This is a chart from 2019 showing 5nl online player pool win distributions (with players with less than 2000 hands filtered out).

The rake of 12bb/100 in this sample is similar to live rake. As you can see from the chart the highest win rate reached by the top 1% is around 40bb/100. While there's no online stake that's 100% analogous to a live stakes, online microstakes seem the closest.

Either way, there's no standard win rate. We all sit at some point on a curve like the one above. 10bb/hour is probably the top 1% winrate (or maybe 2 or 3% if you want to be generous) someone might shoot for if they become one of the best, if not the best player at their stake. It is not the winrate most regs will achieve.

Last but not least, variance in live games is higher than online. Due to some wonky results I did a deep dive on my own stats recently and concluded that my Standard Deviation sits at around 150bb/100. Online is 95-100bb/100. Live callers, overcallers and multiway pots do make the games more swingy.

My alternative explanation is that most people work on improving their games. In doing so, they cancel each other's efforts.

When there are claims of a win-rate >10bb per-hour at midstakes, aside from obvious cherry-picking and sample-size issues, I'm looking for game-selection bias. Sometimes players manage to find a deepstack game, with various punters/exploitable regs, in which they might run a little above expectation. This "gold mine" game, which might last say a month or so before people go broke/other pros find out about it, can definitely spike win-rates, especially if people play deep and don't know what they're doing (also there comes a point where consistent straddles effectively muddy the water of whether it's a 2/5 or 5/T etc). While the "10-years-live-pro" thread is relatively genuine (it is on 2+2 and there's no real peer-review/vetting process), my sense is the OP of that thread has managed to game-select very well, which he acknowledges, and would probably be a 5-8bb/per hour winner if his game selection nous wasn't as pronounced (plus his ability to adapt exploitatively to games quicker than other pros is probably more developed as well).

Honestly, for all my efforts, there's no way to really improve on these two sentences. I literally struggled tying a bow on my posts because what's the point really? What is a "sizable subset of hte population" even? Statistically speaking, the normal winrate is vastly negative, so if you're winning money playing this stupid card game then good on you.

Comparison is the thief of joy. Who cares what LLinus would make if he played 2/5NL? For that matter, people drive themselves insane comparing their results to their own results at their peak.