Per hour winnings online?

[Charlie Frank]

BB stands for Big Bet when it is used in the context of "2-3 BB/hour".

This whole obsession with how many BB/hour everyone wins slightly annoys me. I've always seen poker as a hobby - if you are winning, you are winning. Who cares how many BB's you are beating the game for, per hour?

If you think I'm being an idiot, let me say this:

Firstly, the vast majority of sample sizes I hear people quote are simply too small. You'd need over 10,000 hours to be able to rely on your statistics with a level of confidence. And if you've played 10,000 hours, you probably wouldn't be asking the question in the first place.

Secondly, every game is different. There are so many variables in poker that to say "You should be beating a limit game for 2.5-3BB/hour" is simply ludicrous, in my opinion. You could be beating a game for 3BB/hour and be playing below the potential for that game. You could be beating a game for 1BB/hour and be simply playing as good as is possible in that game.

Money in poker comes down to this:

If poker is a hobby, then you win 0.01/BB hour, then you are doing well.

If you are relying on poker for a living, then you should already be playing at such a high level that BB/hour is irrelevant - you should be playing as well as anyone could possibly play in that game. If you are not making enough to survive, you either need to look at getting a job, look at fixing leaks in your game, or look at finding a new game/site.

Tell me if you think I'm wrong.

CF

[Penguinfan]

In all honesty I am still a losing player, I am getting better, which means closer to break even but nontheless I admit to losing money playing poker. It amazes me the amount of people who claim to be big winners all the time, or the people who claim the lucky fish are killing them, there seems to be no middle ground at all. I am not embarassed to be a losing player, I am still learning, but at least along the way I am honest with myself. I made a $500 deposit at the beginning of the year and have a little less than half of that left now. Of course I hope to turn it around by the end of the year, but it don't look good To me it was worth the money for the entertainment value alone and the experience. I won't consider it a total loss if I make the years end without re-depositing.

[Talking Poker]

Good post. I agree with you, but I will add that I think monitoring your win rate can be a useful tool. Not so much to compare yourself with other players, but to compare yourself with yourself.... to help you determine if you have any leaks in your game, and so on.

I realize it takes a lot of hands to reach the long run (10,000 hours seems a bit high though - thats 5 years of working full time), but I still think tracking your play can be very valueable, and should be something everyone should do - but not for the sake of comparing BBs/hour to other player who play different games under different circumstances.

Now, if you and I play the same limits on the same site and we each have 10 or 20,000 hands played there, I think it WOULD be useful for us to compare win rates. If you're winning 3.25 BBs per hour and I'm winning .25, yes, we're both winning players, but I'm willing to bet we play differently and you are a better player than I am. Not only that, but I think we should compare notes and figure out why you are more successful than me, so I can start winning more too. In other words, let's use this data to FIND the leaks in our games...

[2Tone]

Talking Poker is absolutely right. BB is Big Bet, not big blind. My mistake.

Meanwhile, I understand that I’m supposed to be performance rather than results oriented. The Cards Speak Blog has a good post on this the other day () . But not monitoring your win rate seems crazy to me …

[Charlie Frank]

Excellent point. Of course, even if there was such a disparency(sp? - too lazy to get a dictonary), all it could mean is that one person has better table selection skills. It would take a LOT of work to find the variable/s that are making the difference.

CF

[BlibbityBlabbity]

I do play as a hobby, so I agree with you up to this quote.

If I were to play (If I were good enough to play) for a living I would think that BB/hour would be an essential measure as it is with any other job, if for no other purpose than to set goals to keep focused.

Just my opinion, as I don't play for a living.

[Charlie Frank]

It would be a pointless exercise.

My whole point was that BB/hour cannot be relied upon to give you any real clue as to whether you are "beating" the game for all it is worth.

It is an almost useless statistic. You need thousands and thousands of hours of records for your confidence level in that statistic to be high enough to make assessments with it.

You can't play at a home game for 10 hours, and walk out satisfied, thinking, "I won 2.7BB/hour - therefore I played well." A bad player could win 2.7BB/hour, and a good player could lose that much per hour.

Even after logging the thousands of hours needed to ensure your BB/hour win rate is even legit, it STILL doesn't tell you the whole story. You can't log 10,000 hours playing at a casino 2/4 game and think that your 3BB/hour win rate means you were killing the game. That particular game might have been so bad that you really should have been beating it for 5 or 6BB/hour. Do you see what I mean?

Its a pointless, arbitrary exercise.

CF

[eddo31]

i understand a lot of your points cf, but i dont think that keeping stats, particularly bb/hour is pointless or arbitrary.

i completely agree with the point that it doesnt tell you what your potential is, given perfect play. but i do believe that it can tell you a lot about what games you should play.

i dont ever really set goals for individual sessions, as there are way too many variables that can positively or negatively effect a session in the short run, but i do have long term goals, and i find tat stats and good notes can help me on that way.

[robert2504]

I rely heavy on statistics. It definitely has helped me stop depositing money into sites. I wouldn't want to call someone that raised the pot on the river 10X with my two pair when I see that his BB is 30 is his win rate is 89%.