Big Blinds per hour

[ItsMrAlex2u]

I know any positive number = profit being made but what is a good number to aim for at any level of NL. What would you consider a winning player should aim for as a minimum and what numbers are just so high they are becoming unrealistic.

Curious to hear peoples views.

cheers

[Moskvich]

This question seems to get asked quite regularly, so a search for ptbb might yield some more answers... But in general I think somewhere in the mid to high single figures (per 100 hands rather than per hour) is pretty good going. I mainly play full ring so I'm not sure how well this applies to 6-max, but at lowish levels I think from 6-8 ptbb/100 (ie actually 12-16 big blinds per 100 hands) is getting towards the most a decent player can expect. I read a thread on 2+2 the other day where someone said he felt he was running bad but was still "crushing" the game for 5ptbb/100. If you can sustain 10ptbb/100 then I'd guess you're probably playing too low.

These figures obviously depend on all sorts of factors, particularly your style of play and the number of tables you play at once. I'd guess that your standard rock wouldn't make much more than 2-3ptbb/100, standard TAG maybe 5-6, and it would take a very good LAG to make say 9-10. Obviously the looser you play the greater the (detrimental) effect that multitabling can have on your winrate.

Interested in others' views.

[RichEO]

You don't really refer to winning as number of BB in No Limit, that is more useful in limit, and I think 2 Big bets an hour was the target (in some book I read).

Another book I read suggest working out your win rate per hour. This is hard to do as even over a few weeks/months variance might be skewing your figures. I know I also play around with my levels / number of tables / sites a lot and this messes up my consistency.

But if you get enough data, word out how much you make per hour and if it's good enough for you to live off / better than X job etc, this is a much more valuable statistic IMO.

[doubleup]

There are a lot of factors to this. Some consider that you have to play 100k hands to find your true winrate, so a lot of winrate claims are based on far smaller samples.  If you are beating a 400nl game for 5ptbbs for 100k hands you are doing very well.  It's quite possible to have that kind of winrate only playing weak opponents, but if you are multitabling a fews hours each day there won't be enough easy games, so your rate will drop. 

There's a thread on 2p2 at the moment about estimates of how many ppl make 500k a year from online poker  - no one obviously knows, but the consensus appears to be less than 1000.  Given that you could make about 400k pa by 6 tabling 400nl at 5ptbbs per hour and doing the same hours as a normal job. I think this indicates that there really aren't many ppl winning that amount.