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Measuring Success in Cash Games

• Texas Holdem Cash Games
• Poker Cash Game Strategy
• 1 2 No Limit Hold'em Cash Game Strategy
• 1 2 Cash Game Strategy

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Before we discuss the strategy in cash games, it’s important to define what success means. Success in cash games is measured in what’s called a win rate. Your win rate is the difference in skill between you and your opponents, minus the rake. Win rates can be negative if your opponents are better than you or the rake is too high (this most commonly happens in private home games where the usurious rake renders the game unbeatable).

Win rates online are measured in big blinds per 100 hands whereas win rates live are measured in big blinds per hour.

Here’s a simple example. John is a regular at the $5/$10 No Limit Hold’em cash game at the Bellagio. Because he keeps good records (something we strongly recommend all players do—you can use the app, ‘Poker Income’ or ‘RunGood’ to easily track your records), John knows that he has won $2,000 in the last month/50 hours of play—including tips and rake.

To calculate his hourly rate is simple: $2,000/50 = $40 per hour. (Therefore his bb/hour is 4).

To measure his win rate (in big blinds per 100 hands or BB/100), we first have to know how many hands he plays per hour on average. While the true number of hands dealt may vary slightly from casino-to-casino (depending on the speed of the game and number of players seated at the table), I’ve calculated that on average John can expect to play 27 hands per hour:

John has therefore played 50 x 27 = 1,350 hands.

John has won $2,000/10 or 200 big blinds.

John’s win rate is 200/(1,350/100) or roughly 15bb/100.

John should be proud; that’s an incredible win rate: although statistically insignificant, since 1,350 hands is not a large enough sample size. (For more on how to calculate win rates and variance, in both tournaments and cash games, see my definitive guide to bankroll management).

The truth is that 90% of poker players will have a negative-win-rate; therefore, any positive-win-rate should be considered an accomplishment. Assuming that you have a positive-win-rate, you can begin to compare your win rate against other players with positive-win-rates.

Breaking down the 10% category of positive-win-rate players even further, we can calculate various levels of win rates for live poker. Keep in mind that these are just estimations and possible win rates, and that games vary incredibly from casino-to-casino and player-to-player.

Online win rates will be reduced dramatically. Anything above break-even online is considered
great, whereas typical win rates at mid stakes games are 2bb/100 (or 0.5bb/hour), a testament to how competitive the games have become.

For live poker, I’m basing my estimations on some diligent records I kept over the years playing live poker in Macau and talking to other winning players, clients and readers whose games I respect. In my own experience, I regularly won 15BB/hour in Macau for the several years at stakes as high as $10,000/$20,000 HKD, No Limit Hold’em (roughly $1,250/$2500 USD)

– Amateur: Losing win rate.
– Good Player: Anything above breaking even, or > 1BB/hour
– Very Good: > 3BB/hour
– Great /Pro: > 5BB/ hour
– Excellent: > 10BB/hour*
– World Class: > 15BB/hour

*If you are regularly winning at 10BB/hour, I would advise moving up to the next limit to test out the competition and sharpen your skills.

To get a statistically significant sample size, you must play thousands of hands to determine that your win rate is not the result of luck or variance, rather a true skill advantage.

For more information about variance in cash game poker check out this video:

Playing in games with a lower rake is one way you can immediately improve your win rate in cash games. Casinos such as the Commerce in Los Angeles and the Bellagio, Aria or Wynn in Las Vegas offer safe, secure cash games with competitive rake. (They even give players rakeback in the form of food comps).

Online poker usually has the lowest rake, but since the level of competition is higher, it usually means that your overall win rate is still lower online than it is live. Most people will profit more in live poker games because the influx of recreational players makes the game much softer.

Many players have strong opinions about the impact rake has on our no-limit hold'em earn rate. Since actual data is the best way to answer such a question, I gathered hand histories from Las Vegas $1/$2 and $2/$5 no-limit hold'em cash games. Overall, I analyzed nearly a thousand hands taken from four Las Vegas cardrooms at various times of the day and on various days of the week. There were differences among the cardrooms, but I will only summarize the averages here.

$1/$2 No-Limit Hold'em Rake

Stats for Las Vegas $1/$2 NLH games are summarized the first column below. This is based on a 10 percent rake, up to a maximum of $4, as long as there was a flop. A $1 jackpot drop was also taken whenever a rake was taken. A total of 71 percent of these hands were raked, so there was also a jackpot drop 71 percent of the time.

The average rake was $2.164 per hand, the average number of players was 8.78 per hand, and the average dealing rate was 40 hands per hour with an auto-shuffler. Therefore, the average player won 4.56 hands per hour. Accordingly, the average amount of rake paid per player was $9.86 per hour. I call this the 'equity rake' for the game.

Equity rake is the average rake the players paid per hour. But individual players vary from this depending on their playing styles. For example, a tight player will play fewer hands and probably win fewer pots per hour, so his equity rake is probably smaller. Nevertheless, we can learn a lot about the impact rake has on our win rate by studying Mr. Average.

Let's consider Tom Terrific, an extremely good player earning $20 per hour. He would then make about $30 per hour if he could play without a rake. So rake takes an incredible 33 percent from Tom's pre-rake profit, a big factor in his earn rate.

Now let's consider Solid Sam, a decent player making $5 per hour. His pre-rake profit would be $15 per hour and his rake tax would be about 67 percent, double Tom's tax rate. Talk about a regressive tax!

Or we can consider Mediocre Max, a break-even player. His pre-rake profit would be $10 per hour and the rake tax takes all of it.

So the impact rake has on our profit depends on how profitable we are.

Suppose the bell curve distribution of win rates for all NLH cash game players is symmetrical. In that case, the average Vegas $1/$2 player loses nearly $10 per hour, or 5 big blinds per hour, entirely due to the rake. So Max must be much better than mediocre in just to break even. This clearly illustrates that we must be significantly better than average in order to overcome the rake.

$2/$5 No-Limit Hold'em Rake

One possible solution to our rake problem is to move up in stakes. The right-most column in the table shows the stats for Vegas $2/$5 NLH. We can see that in those games the average rake is about one-third higher in terms of dollars. But the average rake is much smaller in BBs or as a percentage of the average winning pot size.

Let's consider Tom Terrific again, Tom makes $40 per hour in $2/$5, slightly worse in BBs per hour than he earned playing $1/$2. He would then make about $54 per hour if he could play without a rake. So rake takes a somewhat lower 26 percent of his pre-rake profit.

Perhaps Solid Sam can make $10 per hour playing $2/$5. His pre-rake profit would be $24 per hour so his tax rate would be 58 percent, also slightly better than his $1/$2 tax rate.

Another way to look at this is that the average $1/$2 player loses about 5 BB per hour, but the average $2/$5 player loses about 2.8 BB per hour. In other words, the rake has a smaller impact on his $2/$5 win rate.

But let's not lose sight of the most important parameter here: our hourly win rate. A player who can eke out a small $1/$2 profit may well be a loser in the tougher $2/$5 game.

Increasing the Rake

A rake increase at our local cardroom would be depressing to contemplate. Some Vegas cardrooms already take a $5 rake, and it can be even larger in other parts of the world. When we see the impact this has on our bottom line, we may wish to reconsider which cardroom we frequent.

The middle columns in the table estimate the cost of a 10 percent rake, up to a maximum of $5 or $6. At first glance, these higher rakes don't seem to be too terrible, increasing the rake per hand only modestly. However, when we consider the equity rake per hour, the average player loses and additional $1.36 per hour for just a $1 maximum rake increase. A $2 rake increase leads to an additional $2.54 per hour average loss in win rate.

We might also expect that a winning player will win a dollar or two less per hour with these higher rakes. But it could be even worse if the higher cost induces the worst players to leave the game, enriching the quality of the remaining player pool.

Jackpots

Our situation seems even bleaker when we consider the jackpot drop. The Jackpot-1 stat refers to taking a one dollar jackpot drop whenever there is a rake drop. We can see that this averages to about $0.71 per hand, which would be an 'equity jackpot' cost of about $3.24 per hour. This is even worse when a second jackpot dollar drops when the pot reaches $30, the Jackpot-2 stat.

Altogether, these 'taxes' cost the average $1/$2 player about $13 per hour with a $1 jackpot drop, and it costs him about $16 per hour with a $2 jackpot drop.

However, nearly all of the jackpot money is returned to the players by way of jackpot payouts. So our equity jackpot losses should not be part of our thinking as long as we participate in all the jackpot opportunities the cardroom provides.

Texas Holdem Cash Games

Suppose the cardroom has a $300,000 'freeroll' tournament requiring 120 hours of play to qualify. This tourney is funded by the jackpot drop from as many as 430,000 dealt hands, so it represents a big chunk of the total jackpot money collected.

If we play insufficient hours to qualify or don't bother to play the freeroll, our share of the prize pool can never come our way. For 1,000 entrants, that would be $300 per player for perhaps 100 hours of qualifying play. Clearly, many players have subsidized the tourney players. So when a cardroom offers such a freeroll, we should make sure we qualify and play, otherwise a big portion of our jackpot 'contribution' can never come back to us.

Another common example is 'Quad-flopper Tuesdays,' where a cardroom pays a $500 jackpot for flopping quads on a Tuesday. If we never play on Tuesday, we are subsidizing those players who do. By piling up our playing hours on days with special jackpot promotions, we are the players being subsidized by players who don't.

Finally, we sometimes see a progressive bad beat jackpot that can become a huge windfall for some lucky player. I don't favor the progressive jackpots because they can take a huge chunk out of the total jackpot pool, and that jackpot money usually leaves the poker community. Furthermore, a large jackpot will automatically trigger a federal income tax liability. Although the live-changing nature of a huge jackpot will induce many players to chase it, I would prefer to see smaller payouts. The $500 quad-flopper jackpot won by a poor player will likely reach our own stack eventually.

Poker Cash Game Strategy

Conclusion

Rake and jackpot drops have a major impact on our low-stakes NLH profitability. They are the driving force dictating that few players are winners. But since we don't generally have the option to play rake-free, all we can do is to play where the rake is smallest. And we can minimize our jackpot tax by exploiting every opportunity to win a portion of the jackpot prize pool.

1 2 No Limit Hold'em Cash Game Strategy

Steve Selbrede has been playing poker for 20 years and writing about it since 2012. He is the author of five books, The Statistics of Poker, Beat the Donks, Donkey Poker Volume 1: Preflop, Donkey Poker Volume 2: Postflop, and Donkey Poker Volume 3: Hand Reading.

1 2 Cash Game Strategy

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