Winrates, bankrolls, and finances

Hey dude, quick thing before i dive into the important and salient points:
my hot single sexy blonde friend saw your post here when I was reading it and she really likes the size of your graph. just wanted to make sure it was cool with you before I pass along your screen name to her so she can reach out when she's feeling insecure and lonely.

second:
i apprecaite your willingness to monitor the thread and assist people but before you go tappin out another reply I'm gonna just point out to you a few things
a) nowhere did i pose a question, nor inquire necessity for someone to tell me things like 10 sessions is a small sample size. in fact, if you READ the post, you'd see that very same admission within the first one - so thank you for trying to make me feel small or stupid, I hope I am doing a service in returning the gift in kind
b) the longer post largely was due to the fact that you ignored half the shit said in teh first post and just tunnel visioned into some kind of teacher student relationship which im pretty sure was not in any way insinuated nor requested in my original post here
c) regarding "using jargon i dont understand" i'd be happy to go through the various things that have harmed your sensibilities in my at times rambling response and if you still think there's some instructional moment to impart upon me and/or speak to specifically as opposed a vague and general insult that doesnt even manage to isolate or point out what exactly youre finding so incredulous (weird methodology of tutelage but hey, im just a student forever)
d) again, in my follow up post you continued to ignore or just not read what was being said and have instead, in line with point a, tunnel visioned some neessity of your response to the thread. i too like the sound of my voice, so I am trying to be understanding. but this is called a boundary, and im not gonna have someone represent a fabrication of my words back at me as part of some complex attempt at an insult
e) if any of this incites you, i figured i'd close it with: clearly i have no idea what im talking about, and I am hardly a blip in the shadow of what youve achieved. congrats my man. sick work. and congrats on all your successes.

Anyone here live in Vegas/care to share stats or thoughts on the games? In 2024 I won about $18/hr across 1/2, 1/3 and 2/5(mostly 500 cap). This year is tracking about the same. It's not that I find the games to be particularly "tough," but rather just difficult to make money in if that makes any sense. This would be due to the presence of multiple short stacks at any 1/2 or 1/3 table and also a lot more pros seem to be moving down in stakes so sometimes even in 500 cap games you will have 2-4 other winning players. Not ideal.

Played 1648hrs last year will probably play more this year

If you look at the poll above, you'll see about 40% of respondents claim a 10+bb/hr winrate (although not limited to just LV games).

Oddly enough though, and IIRC, not very many accompanying giraffes attempting to back up those claims. No doubt cuz most people are too shy to post crushing giraffes / think barging on the interwebz is rude.

GcluelesswinratesnoobG

So last week I book a $357 loss in my 1/3 NL game. No biggee, whatever. But... it seemed to sting for some reason. And I wasn't really sure why.

So I just looked up my stats for this year.

It's my biggest loss of 2025 to date.

W.T.F?!?!

I've played exactly 70 sessions so far in 2025, for 314.42 hours, for an average session length of 4.5 hours.

And meanwhile this ain't even a barg as I'm posting a very meh result in 2025 so far (running at just 77% of my historical winrate).

Gyoudon'tevenknowwhatplayingclosetothevestmeans;me,I'mactuallywearingavestG

^ your standard deviation per session is likely lower than most because (1) you play shorter sessions and (2) of your playing style. Of course a lower SD means your wins might not be as sizeable, either, but I’m willing to stand corrected.

I've definitely ~halved my session lengths. Pre 2024 I averaged 7.6 hours per session, but since then I've only averaged 4.2 hours per session. I also quit before my planned quitting time if conditions aren't favourable (something I didn't really do before as much). So I guess less chance at having those horrendous sessions.

I'm pretty sure I've always had a ridiculously low SD due to my style. Win-wise I've had 6 bigger wins out of my 70 sessions than that "big" (lol) loss, but lol the biggest 3 wins have only been in the $700s.

GcluelesslowvariancenoobG

I wish i had 3 sessions that doubled my biggest losing session, your doing something right.

I checked my own 2025 stats, 198 sessions , 1376 hours, 65% winrate

Biggest loss: 5.3k biggest win : 4.4k

(looks at poll, giggles)

literally no one has a winrate between 0 and 2.5 BB per hour, huh? I find it very unlikely that the distribution just happens to have a hole there. It's pretty funny to me that very slightly winning is somehow more embarrassing for people than being a losing player. I guess if you're losing you can just say you're gambling for fun, but if you're winning, you're trying to be good, so it's not acceptable to only be slightly good.

This makes a lot of sense to me, because the number of hands you'd need to play to be confident that your winrate is within that range is _huge_.

And if you had that winrate and did a random sample of 1000 hours I think you'd be more likely to get any other result than that one.

Also with a result that near 0bb you'd be very likely to have big swings, and during the "downswings" you'd either convince yourself that you should have won more but were unlucky and stop tracking and/or stop playing ... or you'd study a bunch, and then your winrate would change.

Like to work out you are gobbledygeek is fairly easy ... just count the $100s each month. And on the other side it's also easy to see you can't count the missing $100s each month. But if you have massive swings in both directions, the obvious conclusion isn't "I'm near break even".

I'm actually a little surprised about the number of people that think they have 2.5-5bb winrates. I'd guess it'd be even more polarized.

Yeah this. The fact that IDK/Sample too Small is the second most popular choice on the poll is important. Probably a lot of people within 5bbs of breakeven one way or the other in there.

RE: 2.5bb-5bb winrates, when I responded to that poll a couple years ago that was the response I chose. It was accurate at the time over a ~500 hour sample. At the time I responded I remember actually feeling kinda proud that I was one of the only people brave enough to share honest results showing a lower winrate.

Now after another ~500 hours of mostly sunrun (and ofc some improvement to my play), my winrate is in the 7.5bb - 10bb category over a 1k hour sample. Don't think you can change responses and obviously there isn’t really a need to.

Also FWIW, I think if I was coming off 500 hours of runbad and my winrate had tanked below 2.5bb/hr I probably wouldn’t still be posting on this board, for one reason or another.

Don't almost all of these points apply equally to every category except the first and last (<0 and >10) since all of them are the same radius? If you are in the 5-7.5 category it's equally narrow, so you should equally have large swings in both directions, and it should take an equal amount of hands to be confident that this is your answer.

My guess is that the choice of the threshold is doing a ton of work though. If someone has played 100 hours, say, and their winrate is 5.7BB/hour, I think they're quite likely to choose 5-7.5, whereas if the same person has played for 100 hours and their winrate is .2BB/hour, they're very likely to answer that they don't have enough data.

I think as a matter of statistics, this is not true. Given any real winrate X, the probablity distribution over the observed winrate should always be a bell curve (or approximate bell curve since poker isn't just a biased random walk) centered around X.

My guess would be there's a posting bias in a Winrates thread in a poker forum in that most people that would take the time to sign up / post would be skewed to winners, although it is odd that more losers posted than slight winners (although still a very lol number overall).

My guess for most poker ecosystems is that the results would actually be the opposite of this poll, in that the majority of winners would be slight ones and then the numbers would decrease as the winrates increased.

Gproudlyandshamelesslyrockinga6.87bb/hrwinrateover6634hours@1/3NLG

Using only statistics like

https://www.primedope.com/poker-variance-calculator/

Primedope

Poker Variance Calculator

However, I would assume that's wrong for humans playing live poker for a few reasons:

1. The lower your winrate the more likely you are to go on a big downswing, which will affect almost everyone mentally.

2. The worse you are the more likely it is that you have a big leak, in certain spots. And I'm guessing a little bit but I'd say that around 0bb your standard deviation will be higher than at other levels as your results will depend more on how often the spots you have a big leak in come up.

3. The higher your winrate the more likely you are to show up and play. Lots of maybe not obvious indirect advantages here, IMO.

I somewhat agree. My guess is that each choice should be wider, probably with overlaping values. But a more significant factor is how many hands/hours ... if someone has 100 hours of results then they can almost pick a random answer and be as accurate (maybe GG is an exception due to his tiny SD).

Full disclosure, I answered "don't have enough data" whatever year I answered.

This alludes to something that I think is rarely mentioned in discussion of what win rates should be. When considering what an "average" win rate should be in whatever context no one ever factors in good players who "should" have a much higher win rate but just run very very bad for a very long time. So they just quit. I am curious what people's thresholds are before they throw in the towel? Over the past 9 years/10,000 hours played I've had 3 major downswings/breakeven stretches of 500-1000hrs(mostly 1/2 and 1/3) and they have been BRUTAL. Overall win rate is in the 7-10bb range. And from what I can tell stretches like this are somewhat normal. But I can't imagine most people would survive this - because rationally - why would you try? Poker would seem futile and I imagine most people would simply want to do something else with their time after a while. But if we are saying what an "average" should be over a huge sample - I think those estimates should be much lower because we have to add in all the people whose true win rate is much higher than their actual win rate. We don't get that data because they are gone - like you said - you would not be posting on this board if you didn't start winning after a while

^^^^

I know I've told this story before somewhere, but I started off my real poker journey in 2006 in the 2/4 Limit streets. Right out of the gate, I faired pretty poorly (in what was almost an unbeatable game to begin with), dropping $1200 over my first 40 sessions. I'm not exactly sure where my breaking point would have been, but I'm pretty sure if I hadda dropped just another $800 to reach that $2K mark, conservative frugal me likely would have never stepped in a poker room again.

Gthatwas19yearsand$176KinwinningsagoG

Last night the cashier whom I tip generously carefully counted out $700 into my wallet (no other $100 bills). When I opened my wallet in the morning, only $600 was there. I double checked my bankroll log and $400 cash was gone. My wife confessed "she might have given $200 to the cleaners" out of my bankroll (I put in $200 promissory notes whenever we do). But my wife did not take the $100 last night. The only other person in my home is my fifteen-year-old son dating a poor girl whom he takes out to McDonalds and skips family meals.

My questions for the forum:

Who took the $500?

What do you do when people take from your bankroll?

Can I take $500 out of my life role after my fifteen-year-old son takes it? Bankroll reset to $2,650, if guilty and punished? It sucks buying in for 225.

If your son is stealing from you you have far larger issues than how that effects your bankroll management.

That’s an understatement. I can’t prove he stole it, but he definitely broke my trust. I welcome advice on parenting (cash is in the lock box now) but fifteen year old boys with adhd make bad decisions. I will never encourage him to go to a casino.

I’m guessing he took $100 once and my wife took $200 for the cleaners twice. My wife enables poker, so she gets a pass.

He's 15, make him get a job and realize how much it sucks earning $100 at McDonald's to pay you back.

Without addressing the family stuff, I would say that the money you win playing poker is the money you win playing poker. If the cashier gives me $565 and I put the $500 in my locked box and keep the $65 in my wallet for spending money, I still enter $565 into my spreadsheet and consider it part of my winrate/bankroll. Ditto if I meet up with a friend after a winning session and buy dinner or give some back playing blackjack. I also periodically forget my cash and withdraw money at the casino (my bank refunds ATM fees) which then gets added to my locked box at home after the session. The physical bankroll is very fluid, but the spreadsheet bankroll is very rigid.

Yes as a recreational player (even a serious/winning recreational, which is how I would classify myself) with an alternative source of income, there is simply no need to have a formal bankroll. I have enough cash to bring to the casino in my bedroom, enough money in online accounts to play online, and then the rest of my "bankroll" is indistinguishable from my liferoll in a high-yield savings account. If you have $2000 in cash, that is more than enough to take to the casino to play $1/$2. Buy in for the max and reload from your life roll if you need to at any point. Track your results and play within your means. If you go on a big downswing and are uncomfortable withdrawing more money, take a couple weeks off to study and rebuild.

If you are running your poker like a business, that is ass backward. The spreadsheet doesn't mean a hill of beans if the money isn't actually there. You can't pay bills or buy in with missing cash. If someone embezzles from my business, it is going to be reflected in the accounting. I might back it out and do a proforma financial for the purposes of analyzing the effectiveness of an advertising campaign or something like that. But if your numbers in your accounting are not going to be accurate, why the heck are you accounting at all?

Cash is simply not a secure way to keep money, It is easily lost, easily stolen, and difficult to track. Worse, cash doesn't earn interest, And if you have a proper poker roll to even consider living off of you have a lot of cash that's sitting around that you won't need most of the time. Stick it in a money market, or t bills. That's the live poker version of rakeback. If you are taking poker seriously and trying to make it a source of livable income, you need to get in the habit of putting your money in a bank, properly accounting for it and not using it as your personal slush fund. Mixing business and personal funds is a recipe for poor financial management for any business.

I'd use a brokerage account like Fidelity because they reimburse ATM fees and you can get $10k teller advances at most casinos and wiring is free if you're playing big enough to need it. Brokerages typically have far fewer fees than banks/credit unions.

For Adonson, if you are going to keep it physical, consider keeping your poker roll in chips. Just color up on your way out of the casino.

Yeah, I guess I should have clarified that I am a "trying recreational" with a full-time desk job and not a pro, which I assume is the same set-up as adonson. I have the majority of my live winnings in a high-yield account, online winnings in a crypto account, and only enough cash to withstand a small $2/$5 downswing.

I stand by the fact that it's important to me to keep a spreadsheet so I can track my results accurately, but far less important that my cash reserve reflects those results, at least in my current living arrangement.