Your win rate is the single most important number in poker. It tells you whether you're beating your game, which stakes you should play and how big your bankroll needs to be. There are three common ways to measure it, and each one answers a slightly different question.
The three win rate formulas
| Measure | Formula | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Hourly rate | Total profit ÷ hours played | Live players comparing poker with other uses of their time |
| bb/hr (big blinds per hour) | Hourly rate ÷ big blind size | Live players comparing results across stakes |
| bb/100 (big blinds per 100 hands) | Profit in big blinds ÷ hands played × 100 | Online players, who count hands rather than hours |
Always use profit after rake. If you tip dealers or pay for travel, decide whether to subtract those too. Most serious players track both: a gross win rate to judge their play, and a net figure to judge whether poker is worth it.
Example: a live $1/$3 player
You've played 300 hours of $1/$3 and you're up $4,200 after rake.
- Hourly rate: $4,200 ÷ 300 hours = $14 per hour
- bb/hr: $14 ÷ $3 big blind = 4.7 bb/hr
The bb/hr figure is what lets you compare games. If you move up to $2/$5 and keep 4.7 bb/hr, you'd make about $23 an hour. In practice win rates usually drop as games get tougher, so track each stake separately.
Example: an online NL50 player
You've played 60,000 hands of NL50 ($0.25/$0.50) and you're up $1,500.
- Profit in big blinds: $1,500 ÷ $0.50 = 3,000 bb
- bb/100: 3,000 ÷ 60,000 × 100 = 5 bb/100
Online, 5 bb/100 is a solid win rate at most stakes. Live games are slower, so live players almost always use hourly figures instead.
You can run your own numbers in the free win rate calculator, which converts between hourly, bb/hr and bb/100.
How many hands before your win rate means anything?
This is where most players fool themselves. Poker results are noisy, so a measured win rate has a wide margin of error until you have a big sample. With a standard deviation of 90 bb/100, a typical figure for online no-limit hold'em, the 95% range around your measured win rate looks like this:
| Hands played | 95% range around your measured win rate |
|---|---|
| 10,000 | ± 17.6 bb/100 |
| 50,000 | ± 7.9 bb/100 |
| 100,000 | ± 5.6 bb/100 |
So a player showing 5 bb/100 after 10,000 hands could truly be anywhere from a big loser to a crusher. Even after 100,000 hands, the true figure could plausibly be close to zero. The formula is simple: 1.96 × standard deviation ÷ √(hands ÷ 100).
Live players face the same problem in hours. A few hundred hours is a small sample, which is why our downswing study found genuine winners can go months without a new high.
Five mistakes that distort your win rate
- Leaving out losing sessions. Forgetting even a few bad nights can turn a losing player into an apparent winner.
- Mixing stakes. A combined hourly across $1/$2 and $2/$5 hides which game you actually beat.
- Not counting all your time. Count the hours you sat at the table, including breaks you took mid-session.
- Ignoring rake and tips. At low live stakes these can be a big share of every pot. See what they cost you with the rake calculator.
- Judging too early. Decide your sample size in advance and don't change stakes based on one good month.
Track it automatically
Doing this by hand works, but it's easy to forget sessions or mis-add hours. The free Poker Tracking web tracker calculates your hourly rate, bb/hr and win rate by stake as you log each session, and shows how sure you can be of the number. To see how much your results could swing at your win rate, try the variance calculator.