Am I a winner?

Hello

I've played about 90 hours of LL Holdém and my win rate is 2BB/hour.

I know 90 hours isn't much and I don't expect my win rate to be this high but can I be fairly sure that I win at least 1BB/hour?


I know questions like these have been answered before, but i couldn't find them in the archives.

If you have to ask the question in the first place this is almost a sure indicator that you are not an expert or a semi experrt which means that you probably are not a long run winner in a raked game. Anyway 90 hours is a miniscule amount of time, but winning 2bb per hour is certainly a good sign. But this doesn't necessrily mean that you are a winner in the long run at all, you could still be a significant loser actually.

Questions like this will take care of themselves in the long run determined by your OVERALL play, so that is where your focus should be.

For a perfect answer to your question refer to Mason's book "Gambling Theory and Other Topics", and there is also a good essay by Sklansky in his book "Fighting Fuzzy Thinking" on this very topic.

You are correct, I'm definately not an expert. Those 90 hours is almost my total playing experience.

From your post I understand that you need to be an expert to be able to beat a raked game even at low limits. Is this true? By expert I mean not to far from David and Masons level.


The game I play in is raked and slightly loose passive. About 3 or 4 players/flop. Do you think it is possible to beat this game for 1BB/hour or maybe even 1.5BB/hour if your a good player but not an expert in the sense described above?

I think I said a semi expert should be able to beat lower games, but then again what does semi expert mean? I unfortunately don't have a clear answer to that. Maybe a better choice of words would be very good player. The most important thing to do is learn ALL you can about all aspects of poker in order to develop a thourough understanding of putting it all together. To answer your question about how much one can win, well it really depends on how well you play, and how game selective you are (usually this is not very important is small games but it does come up sometimes). But the other critical factor is how big the rake is and how its taken. For instance here in So.Cal the rakes are excessively high so I think any game below 6-12 is unbeatable. You are often paying more then a BB per hour just to play. In the 2-4 games I believe they take $2.50 on the button, so this ends up being about 2full BB per hour just to play! Ugh, thats pretty much unbeatable and not even worth thinking about.

its not unbeatable. the players are so loose that anybody who can read hands decently and fold when beaten can beat these games. im not a great player and i was consistently beating them. perhaps not in 'the long long really really long run' you've been touting lately, but over a 6 month period of about 2 8-hour sessions a week, sometimes less? not exactly a huge long run, but 500 BB ahead in that time? i had my share of disgusting beats and drawouts and dry spells. but the payoff was enough. also moving seats to get the best position on your opponents is important. mathematically, if you were playing normal ring games akin to those described in HPFAP21, then, yes, they are unbeatable. but CA LL games are beatable.

Well I suppose we differ on what we feel the long run is. Anyway, I haven't been "touting" my long run ideas lately so I don't know what that's supposed to mean. Anyway, a 2-4 game with a 2.50 button drop probably is unbeatable, but WHO CARES? Is it worth a very few dollars an hour for all the effort and swings of playing low limit. It's a silly topic IMO because it is not real world, I mean who is good enough at poker to beat it for 2bb/hr before the drop, and plays a game like 4-8?

With about 90 hours, the certainty of your win rate is about plus or minus 2.5BBs/hr. You need about 600 hours before you can be certain to plus or minus 1BB/hr.


sam