One of the concerns that I frequently hear, especially among small stakes poker players, is when and how to move up to a bigger game. How do you know if you are ready to move up to a bigger poker game or not? The simply answer is to move up when your bankroll is big enough, and move down when your bankroll is too small. But there are more things to consider besides just the size of your bankroll.

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Are You Winning?

Poker winrates are most commonly expressed in the 4 following ways: bb/100 = The number of big blinds you win per 100 hands. Bb/hour = The number of big blinds you win per hour. $/100 = The amount of money you win per 100 hands.

There’s really only one way to know. You must keep track, down to the dollar (pound, euro, yen, peso, or yuan will do too), of how much you win and how much you lose in each poker session. If you’re playing online then be sure to use poker tracking software – because statistics will not only let you know where your strengths and weakness are in your game, they will assist in your decision of what games to play and when to move up to the next level. By reviewing your playing history you’ll be able to see how you are doing per hour and per big blind or buy-in size.

Win Rates and Return-on-Investment

In cash games your win rate is generally the number of big bets per hour for limit poker and big blinds per 100 hands for no-limit hold’em. Let’s suppose you’ve played 20,000 hands of $25NL ($0.10 / $0.25 blinds) and have made a profit of $2,000. Your win rate would be 6.66 bb/100 – that’s $1.66 per 100 hands ($0.25 * 6.66). Your hourly rate would depend on how many hands you play per hour – playing 500 hands per hour or more across multiple tables is not uncommon for online poker players.

• Yo Yo, I have a statistical question: You have a sample size of 1k hands. From that sample you observe an average win rate of 10bb/100. Q: how would you proceed in answering (with a statistical argument) to the following question: “How much confidence you are in that result?” I heard about confidence intervals but i don’t know where to start.
• Nov 26, 2018  In both cases, the players know their current win rates and use those to estimate what they will win or lose over larger sample sizes. Keep in mind that win rates derived from larger numbers of.

If you’re a tournament or SNG player then you should look at your return-on-investment (ROI). ROI refers to the net profit you’ve earned playing poker. Divide any profit by the gross amount you’ve invested and multiplied by the number of games you’ve played. A ROI of 0% would indicate that you’re breaking even. Let’s suppose you’ve played a 1,000 of your favourite $10 SNG’s, spending $10,000 in the process. Over this period of games you’ve made a profit of $1,500, meaning your ROI would be 15%.

Hopefully you’re win rate or ROI is positive because if you’re not beating your current game then, most of the time, it’s a mistake to move up. There are many benchmarks, formulas, statistics, and graphs available to judge yourself and other players – but it’s better to concentrate on finding the games that maximize your dollars per hour played and grow your bankroll that way.

You should be beating the lower stakes games first. There’s one exception to this that I’d make. Lower stakes poker games can be more heavily raked than the higher stakes games. This is a function of how the rake is calculated. When this is the case, it may make sense to move out of the lowest, and thereby most heavily raked game, as soon as possible, even if you’re not beating it, – just to avoid getting crushed by the rake.

Sample Size

If you just had a winning session of $180 in 4 hours of $50NL, that doesn’t mean that you are beating the game. If you just finished a session of 300 hands of $200NL and doubled your buy-in of $200, that doesn’t make you a winning poker player. Similarly, if you just won a bunch of $20 tournaments in a row, it doesn’t matter. You might have just gotten lucky in each example. Generally speaking, to be really sure that you’re beating the game you’re playing in you need a much larger sample size – 10,000-30,000 hands is considered enough play to gauge how you are really doing in cash games – and 1,000 games for tournament players is a decent sample size.

Your Playing Style

Some poker players are nits or rocks. They win small amounts by risking very little. They have little variance since they play a solid game and take very, very few chances. Other players are plungers. They take huge gambles – even with only very slightly the best of it. If you have a high variance style of poker – say you’re a maniac, then you’d want to start with more. The former players will need less of a bankroll to move up than the latter players because they will show much less variance at the higher level – and will therefore have a much lower risk of running through their bankroll if they run bad for a while.

Bankroll Management

How much money do you have to play poker with? To decide whether you can sustain the variance of a bigger game you need to know what your poker bankroll is and how easily can you replace your playing bankroll? For some, getting $1,000 to play is simple. They have that in stray bills lying around their house – even with no official bankroll. For others, putting together even $50 is difficult. Knowing whether or not you can move up depends on your understanding how easy or difficult it will be to reassemble your playing bankroll if you lose it all at a higher stake. If it is easily gained, then you may play higher than if it is very tough to accumulate.

Calculations vary for determining what bankroll you need for different levels and while that’s not the focus of this lesson it’s worth going over some numbers yet again. So here’s some bankroll management advice:

• For no-limit and pot-limit games a bankroll of 20-40 the maximum buy-in is recommended. So in a $25NL game, which would have blinds of $0.10/$0.25, the maximum buy-in would be $25. Therefore you should be aiming for a bankroll of $500 – $1,000 for these games.
• For limit hold’em I’d recommend a bankroll of 300 to 400 big bets – therefore a $1/$2 limit game would require a bankroll in the region of $600 – $800.
• For tournament players the standard bankroll requirements for large multi-table tournaments is generally around 100 buy-ins. Serious players should double this to 200 buy-ins or more.

The ability to replace a bankroll increases as you play higher. You must be much more conservative in your estimates of what you need as you move up. Similarly, the idea is to have enough money to protect yourself from losing all of it at a few awful sessions.

Psychology and Comfort Levels

Psychologically a poker player is ready to move up when they feel comfortable to do so. When a player feels uncomfortable, they often play weak poker.

It doesn’t matter whether or not you have enough money, theoretically, in your bankroll to play at a higher stakes if you, psychologically, don’t feel comfortable playing at that level. There are millionaires, even billionaires, who just don’t feel comfortable gambling higher than $3/6 limit or $1/2 no limit. Sure, they could afford stakes higher – much higher in fact. But for whatever reason, they just don’t like to gamble with that much money.

If you don’t feel comfortable making a bet because the stakes are too big for your brain, then it’s unlikely you can play that high – period! However there are always exceptions to every rule, and if you are a tight, timid, winning player, then consider forcing yourself to move up. You can always move back down if you are not successful at the new limit, or if you’re psychologically uncomfortable.

Testing the Waters

There’s a major exception to all of these rules and bankroll requirements. You can test the waters in a higher stake game any time you want. You don’t need a pre-determined amount of money; you don’t even have to be a winning poker player in your current game. You can just buy-in for whatever the minimum is, see how you do, and then move back whenever you want to.

There’s much to recommend taking brief stabs like this at bigger games. First of all, it may help you overcome the psychological difficulty of moving to a larger game in the future, when your bankroll and win rate justify it for the long term. It may even help you in your current game, if you tend to be too tight and worry about the money too much. Playing bigger, even briefly, may be like warming up in the on deck circle with a leaded bat. Your swings seem easier when you pick up the regular bat.

Of course there are some disadvantages as well. If you’re playing poker way over your head, without a large bankroll, you may well be playing at a large disadvantage – either tightening up or just gambling because the stakes are too big for you. Similarly, you may cut your session unreasonable short if you start out with some bad luck in the bigger game.

Conclusion

Ultimately, you can move up when you are financially, psychologically, and skilfully able to do so. All of the above information is meant as a guide but not a cookbook for how to do that.

Know your success rate at each limit and for each type of game. The more a player analyzes and find leaks in one’s game, the faster a player can move up to the next limit. This is crucial in helping you to establish what kind of bankroll you might need. But do not necessarily change your game. It could be just the gremlins of fluctuation.

Keep statistics of your poker sessions, and you’ll then have a better idea of what size bankroll you’ll need in order to continue playing the games you already play, and whether you can afford to move up to bigger limits, and bigger buy-ins. Keeping a record of your play will allow you to make faster and better decisions and thus help advance your poker bankroll.

The fastest way to move up is to study a little, play a lot of poker, study a little, and play even more. What could be more fun than playing poker? At each level make sure to check your win rate or ROI – and if necessary, don’t be too proud to move down in limits. This game takes even the best of poker players for big swings. Therefore, a big reserve is good for your psyche whether losing or winning.

By Ashley Adams

Ashley Adams lives in Boston, Massachusetts and has been playing poker for decades. He is the author of two poker books and his specialty is 7-card stud and no-limit hold'em.

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In this article we'll first address how to calculate your win rate for both cash games and tournaments. Then we'll consider a few ways you might use that information to improve your game going forward, including talking about both the positives and the pitfalls that can potentially come with a knowledge of your win rate. Finally, we'll address the question everyone seems to have when it comes to this topic — 'What is a good win rate?'

Calculating Your Win Rate in Cash Games

One note before we start — 'win rate' obviously refers to the rate at which a player is winning. Of course, if the rate is being calculated for a losing player, the number will be negative, which might make it seem misleading to call it a 'win rate,' but that is the term that continues to be used regardless.

If you are a no-limit hold'em cash game player, you will typically calculate your win rate in one of two ways — either by hour or by 100 hands. With each method you also have an option to figure your win rate according to cash won or according to the number of big blinds won.

Live players often calculate win rates per hour, since it can be distracting to count the number of hands they have played while at the table. For example, a player who plays a six-hour session and comes away with a $120 profit has enjoyed a $20/hour win rate for that day.

Online players can more easily keep track of the number of hands they have played, as many sites provide easy-to-consult running totals. Online poker analysis programs like Hold'em Manager and PokerTracker also help players find such information, along with a host of other statistics regarding their play. Also, many online players tend to multi-table, which depending on how many tables they have open could wildly affect the number of hands they play per hour. Therefore, calculating win rates per 100 hands often makes more sense as a standard when playing online.

Say an online player plays a 600-hand session and wins $60. That player's win rate could be described as $10/100 hands. However, those who play online NLHE cash games typically prefer to speak of their win rates in terms of big blinds won per 100 hands — or BB/100.

Let's say that online player won $60 playing 600 hands of $0.50/$1.00 no-limit hold'em. The big blind in the game is $1, meaning the player ultimately profited by 60 BBs. That's a win rate of 60 / 600 = 10 BB/100.

Calculating Your Win Rate in Tournaments

For tournaments (including sit-n-gos), win rates are typically calculated a little differently than in cash games. Instead of talking about an amount won per hour or number of hands, tournament players — both live and online — often measure their rate of success according to their return on investment or 'ROI.'

Put simply, your ROI is calculated by dividing your overall profits in tournaments (your 'return') by the amount you've spent on tournament buy-ins (your 'investment'). Often the result is then multiplied by 100 and expressed as percentage, thus..

• (winnings - buy-ins) / buy-ins * 100 = ROI%

Imagine you're an online player and a fan of the $3.30 buy-in tournaments on PokerStars. Over the course of a couple of weeks you play 100 of them, with all of your cashes adding up to $370. You've spent $330 on buy-ins, so your profit has been $40. Divide $40 (profit) by $330 (buy-ins) to get 0.12, then multiply that by 100 to get 12% ROI.

Like with win rates in cash games, your ROI will be negative if you spend more on buy-ins than you collect in cashes (i.e., you're a losing player over the period being considered). For instance, if you've won $280 in those 100 tournaments that cost $330 total, your ROI will be around -15%.

Calculating Your Win Rate: Positives

• Helps you focus on the long term

Even the best poker players endure bad sessions and downswings. However, having an awareness of your win rate over longer periods can go a long way toward helping you endure the mental stress of losing in poker.

Poker is a game in which skill generally wins out over the long term, but luck can have an disproportionate impact on the short term, especially in tournaments. Keeping accurate records can help you see in an instant how a single bad day or even a lengthy slide doesn't necessarily affect your win rate too greatly over longer periods.

• Helps with game selection

Keeping track of your win rates at various stakes in cash games and your ROI in various tournaments types and buy-ins can help highlight for you which games are your most profitable (and perhaps should be playing more), and also which represent games in which you lose consistently (and perhaps should be playing less or avoiding).

Knowing that you have a solid, positive ROI in that $3.30 buy-in tournament (for instance) and that you're losing consistently in the $5.50 and $11 tournaments you also keep entering might mean you should stop pouring your bankroll into those higher buy-in tournaments. The same goes for cash games, where an understanding of which stakes are best for your win rate can help you know where you should be playing most of your hands.

• Helps with bankroll management

Knowing your win rate also can help you make other decisions regarding your bankroll and how much of it you can reasonably risk in a session or tournament. See 'An Introduction to Bankroll Management' for more on this subject, including how bankroll management directly dictates game selection (or at least it should).

Calculating Your Win Rate: Pitfalls

• Hurts when you look at too small of a sample size

Just as knowing your win rate over the longer term can help you avoid reacting too emotionally over short-term losses, it's also easy to become overly affected by calculations of win rates over very small sample sizes. That player above who is enjoying a handsome 12% ROI over 100 tournaments might be feeling pretty good, but in truth even 100 tournaments isn't really a large enough sample size to suggest that win rate will be sustainable going forward.

Online pros offer differing advice regarding what constitutes a meaningful sample size, though most will tell you anything under 10,000 cash game hands isn't enough to draw meaningful conclusions about win rates. In fact, some argue you need at least 100,000 hands to get a better idea of what your results mean. Such numbers can seem arbitrarily chosen, and you'll find a lot differing viewpoints about them. But the larger lesson here is not to be overly affected by win rates calculated over a clearly small sample size.

• Hurts when you fail to account for different stakes/buy-ins

Go back to that player who won $60 playing 600 hands (a small sample, by the way) of $0.25/$0.50 NLH — a (big) 10 BB/100 win rate. Suppose that player was actually multi-tabling and playing a variety of different stakes games during those 600 hands — say some $0.05/$0.10 hands, a bunch of $0.10/$0.25 hands, and only a few at $0.25/$0.50. The player could still average 10 BB/100 over the 600 hands, but come away a big loser cash-wise if the best BB/100 came at the lowest limits, and the worst BB/100 at the highest.

With cash games, it is often recommended to distinguish between stakes when looking at win rates — that's how you can discover which stakes are most profitable for you, as well as help you make decisions about moving up (or down) limits. It's helpful as well to look at your ROI% in tournaments according to specific buy-ins, although when it comes to tournaments a compiled percentage that includes all of the different buy-ins can still be a useful measure. That's because there often isn't as huge a difference in skill level between players at different tournament buy-ins as there is between cash game players at different stakes.

• Hurts when you falsify your results

Poker Win Rate Sample Size Calculator

Win rates can be dangerous to players who aren't honest with themselves or their record-keeping. They make it easy to isolate a certain period of play and make claims — to others, or to oneself — about having enjoyed a high win rate over the selected period. There's a certain category of players who will even purposely neglect to record losing sessions, practicing a form of denial that extends even to their own, personal poker ledgers.

Keeping records of your play can be immensely helpful as you try to improve as a player, but don't fall prey to being selective and/or inaccurate about your record-keeping in order to rationalize or explain away poor results (even if it's just to yourself).

What Is a Good Win Rate?

Poker Win Rate Sample Size Chart

This is a very difficult question to answer, deserving of an entire article (or series of articles) on its own.

In cash games, the best players at the lowest stakes are often able to sustain especially high win rates (in terms of BB/100) — much higher than the best players at higher stakes, in fact. Speaking of online players, some estimate that the best no-limit hold'em players at the very lowest stakes are able to win 20-40 BB/100 hands over significantly large sample sizes, with the best players at the higher NLH stakes able to win from 3-8 BB/100 (with those figures affected by how many tables they play at once).

Meanwhile in tournaments anything above 0% ROI is obviously good (marking you as a winning player), while achieving even just 5-10% ROI would place you ahead of the vast majority of players. Going higher than that (20-30% and above) is extremely good, with only the top pros genuinely able to maintain such a clip over the long term.

But on a certain level, judgments about what constitutes a 'good win rate' are always going to be subjective. A good win rate for you will be one that (1) keeps you in the game, and (2) helps you achieve whatever goals you set for yourself as a player. Being able to match or better whatever win rate you've achieved in the past can be a good goal for which to strive, but don't let that introduce unwanted stressors or make the game less enjoyable for you.

Also in this series..

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