Introduction to Poker Win Rates
Some poker players are happy to know they’re winning and don’t give their win rate much thought. As you gain experience and take poker seriously though, you’ll want to dive into it and find out exactly how you’re doing. This is where we measure performance and results through a metric called “win rate”. In this article, we’re going to look at what a win rate is in cash games and tournaments, what a good win rate is and how variance impacts win rates.
BTW, Our site is maintained by a cadre of volunteer casino monitors and an active community of video poker players like you, who help keep our video poker inventory up-to-date (and free) by sending us updates. Please do your part and report what you find when your visit a casino. Well, live poker win rates are not measured the same as online poker win rates. Live poker win rates are measured by how many big blinds you make per hour. The consensus has long been that in the two lowest stakes games that most casinos spread ($1/$2 and $2/$5), the very best players can expect to make around 10bb per hour. Do this and you will win any card game very time #shorts #poker #cards #howtocheat #stepbystep.
If a player makes a bet or a raise that no other player calls, they win the pot without showing their hand. Thus, in Poker, there is a bluffing element, and the best combination of cards does not always win the pot! Bluffing is one of the key reasons why Poker is so popular. If a player wishes to remain in the game without betting, they 'check.' This alone doesn’t tell you anything, which is why you must figure out your chances of getting the card you need to win the hand. An easy way to do this is by taking your outs, then multiplying this number by 4, which puts your chances of winning the hand into a percentage.
Cash Game Win Rate
Most poker regulars do not need to compute their cash game win rate. It’s automatically calculated using their poker tracking software. However, with more poker sites banning the use of HUDs, calculating your own win rate will be more important.
The poker win rate in cash games is measured in big blinds. In order to calculate it we need to know the number of hands played and the total profit in big blinds. These two figures are needed as the typical win rate is measured as “big blinds won per 100 hands” AKA bb/100.
Cash Game Win Rate Formula:
Profit in bb/number of hands X 100 = cash game win rate in bb/100
So let’s say you played 10,000 hands and won 200 big blinds.
(200/10,000) * 100 = 2bb/100
And that’s all there is to it. The key to working out your cash game win rate is ensuring you know how many big blinds you’ve won and the number of hands you played. In online poker, you should be able to get this data from poker software or the client. In live poker, you will need to tally up your hands as you play.
What is a Good Cash Game Win Rate?
“Good” is a subjective term when discussing win rates in cash games. There are many factors to what contributes to a strong win rate; location, calibre of opponents, rake and stakes to name a few.
The table below is a rough guide on what a good win rate is in each setting.
As you can see, there is a discrepancy between live and online poker cash games. It’s well established that live poker is far softer, with players lacking the same technical skills as online. Therefore, a strong cash game player can potentially win 10 or more big blinds per 100, with over 20 being extraordinary.
Conversely, with cash games online much tougher, a win rate over 3 is considered a strong win rate. The major online poker sites attract most of the better players.
If you want to maximise your win rate, stick to softer sites. Coral poker is very fishy with potential for high win rates. Click below and register an account to find out.
Tournament Win Rate
Your tournament win rate is simply the return on investment or ROI. To work this out, you simply divide your profit by the amount of tournament buy ins and multiply by 100%. This is the common way to measure tournament success. The formula basically shows how much you earn per dollar. This is in contrast to cash games where you work out how many big blinds you win per 100.
Working out your profit is a simple case of taking your total cashes and deducting the amount spent in buy-ins.
Tournament Win Rate Formula
Winnings/Amount Spent in Tournament Buy ins * 100
So if you’ve won $5,000 and spent $6,000, your ROI is 83%. Please note – this means your cashes are $11,000. We deduct the amount spent first to arrive at winnings.
$5,000/$6,000 * 100= 83.33%
What is a Good Tournament Win Rate?
Like cash games, tournament win rates are dependant on the setting. Again, your ROI is likely to be dependent on the types of tournaments you play.
If you are randomly entering turbo tournaments or a bounty tournament where you lack the expertise in strategy, your ROI will suffer. The table below is a guide as to what I think a good tournament win rate is for live and online poker tournaments.
If you’re generating over 80% ROI in live tournaments, you’re doing fantastic. Likewise, anything over 40% for online poker is exceptional.
The table above should give you a good idea on what strong tournament players can expect to achieve. Are you near it? If not, why not join our training video membership? Most of our content is tournament based and may help you increase your ROI a few percentage points?
The Impact of Variance on Win Rates
The word that most serious poker players hate “variance”. Most poker tracking software has the ability to show you where you should be after X number of hands based on your data.
If you’re on a heater and showing 15 bb/100 but run the simulation of where you should be without variance, you may actually be at 1bb/100. This is a huge thing to remember as sometimes players make decisions like moving up stakes on the back of a good run of cards.
On the flip side, a player may lose confidence and drop down a few levels when they’re running bad when they in fact should be crushing.
In the long run, variance should not play a big part. The laws of probability show that it’s unlikely to have a big influence on your win rate over serious volume. I’m talking over the course of over 100,000 hands plus, or a year of playing.
Hourly Rate
This article has focused on win rates for cash games and tournaments. Whilst bb per 100 and ROI are key metrics to measuring success, I think hourly win rate is the most important metric of all. It is possibly the easiest and simplest way to calculate how you’re performing.
All you need to do is work out how much you win a in a session and divide it by the number of hours played. So, if you played 8 hours and won $320, you’re averaging an hourly rate of $40.
This formula can be used in tournaments too. Naturally, it needs time to bear out in order to find out how much you can expect to make per hour from tournaments.
The key to understanding your hourly rate is to only judge it at intervals e.g. monthly or quarterly.
A True Hourly Rate Needs Data and Time
You need plenty of data to properly account for short term fluctuations. A good day you may win $100 an hour and a bad day you’re losing $80 an hour. That doesn’t mean you played exceptionally and awfully, it could have been coolers or bad beats.
The hourly rate can also be impacted by number of tables you play. You may find that 4 tabling NL $50 is more profitable for your hourly rate, albeit it at lower win rate when compared against 2 tabling NL $50. I think generating the best hourly rate is far more important than being able to boast of earning X BB per 100.
If you’re keen to improve your hourly rate, I suggest taking a look at our poker excel dashboard services. We can create a dashboard and report to you on a monthly basis. The report includes various measurements of performance and recommendations too. Click below for more information where you can also download a sample report and get a FREE quote too.
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You’ve come to the right spot if you’re looking for essential and fast poker tipsand tricks to help you win.
Today, we’ve put together a list of tactics and techniques to help you become a more confident and booming poker player.
This list will not show you how to win every time – not even the best poker players will do it – but it will help you enhance your game, whether you play cash games, tournaments, live poker rooms, or online.
Are you finding it tough to make a regular profit at the poker tables? Is the right way to characterize the performance “somewhere near break-even”?
First and foremost, rest assured that you are not alone. This is how the vast majority of poker players work.
However, often all it takes is a few slight poker strategy tweaks to turn the game from average to extraordinary — from even smashing it.
I’ll send you nine subtle but handy poker tips in this article to help you move your game to the next level.
Also Read : Everything You need to Know about Poker Game Poker Online Strategy Guide
Top 9 Best Poker Tips And Tricks for Beginners Strategy For Winners
1) Play Fewer Hands And Make Sure To Play In An Aggressive Manner
Even the world’s best players have a limit to how many starting hands they will play before the flop in No-Limit Texas Hold’em. If you want to play so many hands, your chip stack will dwindle (unless lady luck is on your side).
Developing a robust preflop poker strategy is by far the best and most effective way to raise your bankroll. Although it is relatively simple to create solid pre-flop ranges (for example, by downloading our free preflop charts), keeping the commitment to stick to them is more complicated. Allowing yourself to get impatient and playing a side that isn’t worth playing is a terrible idea.
The best poker tips and technique is to play a limited number of solid and playable hands, and you must play those hands regularly.
2) Do Not Limp At All
As the first player to reach a pot, limping (just calling the major blind before the flop) is a no-no. This play should be stopped for two key reasons:
- You wouldn’t be able to win the pot before the flop if you raised it.
- You send the players behind you very tempting pot odds, raising your chances of facing multiple opponents and thereby decreasing your chances of winning the pot.
Only in cases when at least one other player has already limped is it appropriate to limp. This is known as over-limping, and it can be a lucrative tactic when you have better pot chances to enter the action in the hopes of finding something positive on the flop.
3) Bluff With Confidence
You must be able to bluff successfully if you want to conquer poker completely. This is one of the best poker tips and tricks you can follow. However, bluffing inefficiently is one of the easiest ways to lose money at the poker table. So, how do you keep your bluffing to a bare minimum?
The most successful way to bluff is to let the cards you have decide whether or not you can bluff. This entails bluffing with hands that have outs to boost to the better hand on a corresponding street, such as straight draws, flush draws, or even just a pair of overcards to the board.
4) Build A Pot And Earn More Money
When a player tests their flopped nut flush three times and then has to awkwardly table their monster poker hand when their opponent checks the river, it’s a sad sight. Slowing down too far is a typical error made by players who are scared of chasing their opponents out of the pot with heavy poker hands.
To build the pot and secure your equity, it’s typically best to bet your strong hands. That’s not to suggest you can still bet/raise after the flop with your firm hands. You can say if you have solid hands if you:
- It’s doubtful that you’ll be outdrawn in this game.
- There aren’t a lot of scare cards to save you from being charged on subsequent highways.
- The spectrum of your adversary is strongly biased against hands with little showdown worth.
5) Defend Your Big Blinds Confidently
Since you’ve already placed one major blind into the pot, the big blind is a unique place. As a result, if you’re in the big blind and you’re faced with a boost, you’ll have stronger pot chances to call than the other places – think of it as a discount.
You will profitably call with far more hands than if you were seated in another place because of your discount and the fact that you are the last person to operate preflop.
That’s not to suggest you shouldn’t call raises with junk hands like 9 5, but borderline hands like K 9 and Q 6 become playable in most cases. The size of your defense depends on a variety of factors; here are the four most significant ones.
How Do You Win Video Poker
- The raiser’s place (play tighter against the early positions and looser against the late positions).
- The number of players in the side is the number of players in hand (when one or more players has already called the raise, play tighter and only call with hands that do well in multiway pots).
- The extent of the wage rise (the larger the bet sizing, the tighter you should play, and vice versa).
- Sizes of stacks (when short-stacked, play fewer speculative hands and prioritize high card strength).
Also Read : Poker Game Rules – Poker Study Guide for the Beginners
6) Fold When You Are Not Sure
What is the most important contrast between a poor player and a professional player? When a good player thinks they are beaten, they will put down a good hand like top pair.
This can seem to be a straightforward task, but it is impossible to achieve in reality due to the complexity of our brains. We have a natural appetite for new ideas and a natural ability to excel. We give up our chance to win the pot when we fold, and we don’t get to indulge our interest by seeing what our adversary has.
The second fastest way to lose at poker is to call too soon, even in the wrong conditions (after ineffective bluffs). Do yourself a favor and fold if you’re uncertain whether to call or fold versus a bet or raise.
Pro Tip: When folding in one of these cases, make a mental note of the specifics of the hand so you can find out whether you made the proper fold later. Studying and/or addressing these styles of hands is a perfect way to keep your skills fresh and fill in any experience holes you might have.
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7) Attack Your Opponent When You Feel They Are Weak
Plays don’t search as much as they can with hands that can call several bets. This means that when they search, they generally have a bad hand and will often fold when faced with several bets. This is the situation I pointed to earlier when I said I was “bluffing for nothing.”
How Do You Win At Video Poker
If your opponent displays a lot of vulnerability in a heads-up pot (for example, if they search on the flop and turn), you should use an offensive bluffing tactic to take advantage of them. You should not only bet with your normal semi-bluffs, but you should also bet with some nothing hands, preferably ones with strong blocker effects.
8) Play Carefully
There are a time and a place for stack preservation, and it’s not at the start of a poker tournament. One of the most overlooked facets of tournament poker strategies is the use of blinds.
Remember that you’ll need to at least double or triple your starting stack in order to finish in the money (usually more). Instead of playing defensively, you should play strong and aggressive poker early on to create a stack that will allow you to go deep.
9) Play Only When You Feel Like Playing
If you’re a casual player or a coach, poker should be a pleasurable game. You’ll do best when you’re pleased, so it’s only natural that you should play this mentally taxing game when you’re in that mood.
If you start to feel irritated, exhausted, or furious, you should finish the session right there and there. You can almost definitely save a lot of money by doing so. Poker will also be eligible the next day.
Conclusion
In order to get a positive win-rate, you must be better than half of the players at the table. And you want to play among the worst players you can find if you want to make a sick-good profit.
The following is a guide for a competitive poker game:
- At least one player limps on a daily basis.
- There are several multiway pans.
- Re-raises are either exceptionally rare or extremely common.
If two or three of these boxes are checked in a game, you’re in a fantastic position to profit. Get up and find a more lucrative table if neither of these boxes are tested (unless you feel like putting your poker strategy to the test).
Also Read : How to Play Poker – Easy to Follow Steps Poker Rules