Who much will you win?
If you are serious about your poker playing you have to keep track of your results. And not only the amount of money won or lost but also time played and at what levels. After a few hundreds of hours you will get an idea of your hourly winning rate.
Off line at limit hold ém a good player will make something like 0,5-1 big bet per hour if playing at a full table, 9-10 players. If he plays $20-$40 he will make 20-40 $ per hour in average.
Online the game is much faster and most good players play 2-4 tables simultaneously. There is also a lot of really weak players in the lower limits who plays poker just to gamble. An hourly winning rate of 3-5 big bets per hour is reasonable to expect from a good player online. That means that if you learn to beat the $3-$6 fixed limit games, which is actually not that hard, and you are playing full-time you could make over $ 50 000 per year.
In No-limit it is harder to calculate what hourly rate to expect. A really good loose-aggressive player can have an extremely high hourly winning rate if he plays shorthanded tables 5- or 6-seaters.
My first year playing full-time I played mostly NL $1-$2 6-seaters 2 or 3 tables simultaneously. And after over 2000 hours at that level my hourly winning rate is $24.5. I believe that is a reasonable rate to expect for the serious poker player. You don’t have to be very talented to win that much, I’m not, I’m just take my poker playing seriously.
At $1.5-$3 my winning rate is $39 and at $2.5-$5 $62.
At NL$1.5-$3 the games are still relatively easy to beat and at that level you should expect to make something like $50-$70 000 per year if you are playing full-time.
If you are talented and can beat the NL $10-$20 you can make as much as $170-$280 000 a year.
Figures from other good conservative players give us the same sort of results from other limits.
If you are playing 2-3 tables NL 6-seaters this is what you should expect to earn.
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blinds $
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win rate $/h
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0,25-0,5
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6-8
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1-2
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20-26
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2-4
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36-48
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5-10
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70-100
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10-20
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100-160
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If you play more tables your winning rate would not necessarily increase. The quality of your game will decrease for every table added after the first two. On good days when I’m focused 3 or 4 tables gives me the highest expected earnings. But some days 2 tables are enough .
The standard deviation per hour will be approximately 10 times the expected win rate.
If you play 10-seated tables your win rate will fall but your standard deviation will fall even more. So playing four 10-seaters can give you the same win rate as playing two 6-seaters, but with a lower standard deviation.
If you are playing online tournaments you will have a much higher standard deviation on your earnings. That means it’s more difficult to make a living playing only tournaments. You will have some really good months making a lot of money but then no profit for maybe 2 or 3 month.
A really good tournament player can expect to make 200-300 % profit on his buy ins. So if you play 2-3 tournaments a day with buy ins of $50-$100 you can expect to make a lot of money, if you are good enogh. But the swings in your results will be very big
To keep track of my results, standard deviation and my hourly win rate I use StatKing. It’s an easy to use software from ConJel Co. If you don’t want to spend the $ 29.95 it cost you can keep record in Excel or on paper. But it’s very important that you do keep record if you want to be successful at poker.
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