4 replies to this topic

[TheCinciKid]

I posted this in limit also, but I think there's a bit more traffic here in general so I thought I'd throw this it in here too and see which catches on.

I know that BB/100 is pretty much the accepted standard on winrate and that the accepted standard for a good player is 2 BB/100. However, I don't know that this really holds up when we're talking about live poker, at least in the current climate. First of all, I've yet to see an online game that was as juicy as the live games I've played in (10/20 and below), except maybe at the .5/1 level on Party. Second, it's difficult to calculate how many hands you play when you're playing live. I've heard numbers thrown out there anywhere from 20-30 hands an hour, and I think it really does vary greatly, hence I think it's nearly impossible to calculate exactly how many hands you've seen when playing live poker.

Therefore, we need a different measure for your live winrate. Obviously the easiest way is to calculate an hourly rate. Keep track of how many hours you've played and how many bets you've won and figure out how many BB per hour you have and there's your winrate. What I run into here though is attempting to figure out what the accepted standard for BB/hour should be for a good player in a loose small stakes (10/20 or below) live game in the current poker climate. In Rounders, Matt Damon's character says something about trying to win 1 BB/hour, now in BB/100 this would probably be somewhere between 3 & 4 and I think most people would say that that's simply unsustainable, and maybe it is for all but the very best online and in tougher live games. However, as bad as live games are right now, I hypothesize that a good player can make more than 1 BB/hour. In fact, I think it's entirely possible that a good player could have a winrate of 2BB/hour in a good small stakes live game. The problem of course with this hypotheis is that even if we give the live game credit for 30 hands per hour, the upper end most estimates I've seen, we're giving our player a winrate of more than 6BB/100, which by all rights seems kinda impossible right?

My current guess after throwing all that out is that best we could really hope for is something in the 1.5 BB/hour range which might be somewhere between 4 and 5 BB/100, which in games this bad may very well be sustainable. After all, I won 4 BB/100 in my 10k hands of .5/1 full-ring on Party last summer/early fall and I tend to think that as bad as that game was, it may still be better than your average live game.

Thoughts, comments?

[No_Neck]

1 BB/hour according to rounders

[pokerkid]

After all, I won 4 BB/100 in my 10k hands of .5/1 full-ring on Party last summer/early fall and I tend to think that as bad as that game was, it may still be better than your average live game.

Thoughts, comments?

At 10K hands you can be so far off your true win rate.

At 10K i was beating party .50/1 for 8.3 BB/100.

After 20K i was down to 3.5 BB/100.

[No_Neck]

how many hands before you know? 100?

[pokerkid]

I remember smash saying to get your true winrate, you need 1 million hands. Seems excessive but i'm just repeating what he said.

By 15K you can probably tell if you're a winning player or not. And by 50K i'm geussing you have a decent estimate of how much ur beating a specific limit by.