Plenty of players have been at this for two or three years and still cannot answer whether they are actually winning. Memory always distorts it — the big winning night stays vivid, and the sessions that bled away slowly are forgotten. This page is about turning that into a number you can check.
- ✓Without records there is no answer, and recalling from memory always flatters you.
- ✓Live play uses hourly rate, online uses bb/100, and the two cannot be compared directly.
- ✓Variance is far larger than most people assume; a few thousand hands settles nothing.
- ✓Short-term results and how well you played are much less connected than they feel.
- ✓Records are not only for counting money — they show which stakes and which sessions actually pay.
What to record
One line per session is enough, and the fields are few:
- Date and hours — required for an hourly rate live.
- Stakes — 1/2 and 2/5 have to be counted separately, never merged.
- Total buy-in (including rebuys) and cash-out.
- Venue or site. At the same stakes, the standard of opposition varies enormously between places.
- Online, add a hand count.
Profit is cash-out minus buy-in. The hard part is not the arithmetic — it is recording every session, including the ones you would rather not look at. Remembering only the winning sessions is the most common form of self-deception there is.
Three common measures
Total profit is the most intuitive but says nothing about efficiency. Winning 30,000 in fifty hours and in three hundred hours are completely different things.
Hourly rate = total profit ÷ total hours. The standard measure live, because hand counts cannot be tracked accurately away from a screen.
bb/100 = big blinds won per hundred hands. The standard measure online, and its advantage is that it compares across stakes: 3 bb/100 at 1/2 and 3 bb/100 at 2/5 represent a similar level of skill, the second one simply earns more.
To calculate it, convert your profit into big blinds and divide by (total hands ÷ 100). Twenty thousand hands at 1/2 for a profit of 1,200 is 600 big blinds, and 600 ÷ 200 = 3 bb/100.
For reference: in online six-max cash games, 2 to 5 bb/100 already makes you a solid winner. Anyone claiming a long-term 20 bb/100 is almost always working from too small a sample or from very low stakes.
Sample size: this is the part that matters
Most players underestimate the scale of variance.
Standard deviation in online cash games runs at roughly 80 to 100 big blinds per hundred hands — while a good winner’s expectation is around 3 bb/100. The noise is thirty times the signal.
Which means:
- A few thousand hands mean nothing at all. The result is almost entirely luck.
- Twenty or thirty thousand hands can still mislead you badly. A genuine winner losing money over that sample is perfectly normal.
- Reasonable confidence that you are a winner usually needs a hundred thousand hands or more.
- Live play sees only twenty or thirty hands an hour, so the sample builds dozens of times more slowly. Judge it in hundreds of hours, not in sessions.
What records are really for
Totalling it up is only the surface. After a few months you can break it down:
- Which stakes actually pay. Some players win steadily at 1/2 and become losers at 2/5, and the records will tell you honestly.
- Which sessions are worth attending. A Friday night game and a Tuesday afternoon game can have completely different line-ups.
- How long before you deteriorate. Many players are winners for three hours and start giving it back in the fifth. Without records this is invisible.
These conclusions are worth far more than knowing how much you made this month.
Do not treat results as a measure of play
Any single session contains a great deal of luck. To judge how well you played, look at decision quality:
- Did you call when the price was not there?
- Did you bluff opponents who do not fold?
- Did emotion change the way you played?
None of these has a necessary relationship with the day’s result. You can make every decision correctly and still lose the session. Judging decisions by outcomes is the most expensive thinking habit in poker.
As for what these numbers have to look like before turning professional is worth considering, that is covered in what it takes to play poker professionally.
