Hi all. I have been a successful recreational player for 10 years now, mainly online and some local MTTs. I am a very solid player and have very good win-rates both online and MTTs. With that said, I've started playing 3/5 NL at my local casino over the past few months, trying to add some income and become polished in live cash games.

Here are my results so far:
Total Hours Played: 44.5
Total Winnings: $3,117
Hourly WR: $70

How many hours do I need in live cash games to know my expected win-rate overtime? Any advice here would be greatly appreciated.

Best advice will be found here: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/17...nances-771192/

Very interesting, and super helpful. Thank you!

Nice start. I'd probably ignore results over a 45 hour period and instead ask yourself qualitative questions. Are you generally the best or second-best player at your table? How terrible are the fish, and how often do you find terrible fish/whales that play? How deep does the game play? Are people generally making calling mistakes or instead playing too tight/nitty?

I'm definitely top 3 at the table. At least 5 are always regulars at the 3/5, only 2 of which seem to be very good players. 2 of the regs are very bad post flop players, the other tends to go on tilt hard after a BB.

Everyone is sitting at least 200BB deep. Lots of action.

Many of the regs here tend to bluff re-raise 4x or 5x the bet on the turn if I'm the one leading in. I also find myself check-calling with premium hands then reraising the river, since they're so aggro.

OP: You already know this, but the more hands played, the more reliable the stats on your results become.

It will take approximately 4 hours to play 100 hands live. If you have 10 years experience on-line you can decide how many hands it takes you to feel comfortable with the reliability of the stats.

I would say it would take a minimum of 25,000 hands and six months for you to have any reliable "expected" win rate. Even that is on the low end for data points and seeing how the game changes over time.

I'm just over 3000 hours since I started tracking my live poker and a recent 200 hour downswing has lowered my running hourly by 10%. My winrate after 2000 hours was about 50% higher than my winrate after 1000 hours. My winrate in the 2100-2900 hour stretch was more than double my winrate in hours 0-2100. So even 1000 hour stretches can vary considerably.

At least once you've played 2000 hours you won't be having many sessions that move the dial by more than $1/hour.

I mean, at this stage you've won just over $3k. You will at some point have days where you win or lose over 3k if you are playing these stakes. So your next session could wipe out all your wins so far, that's how little info you have at this point.

Why?

Bragging rights?

Thinking of "turning pro"?

Thinking of relying on poker as a steady "second income" that you can use for "non-essentials"?

Want to know if you go on a downswing and wipe out your profits, should you keep on playing because "your true win rate is +$XX"?

44 hrs in a couple of months is 5 hr/wk. You can pick "prime time" to play and not be tired/burnt out. 40 hrs/wk means playing in a lot of less than great games.

My "WHY" is honestly more of is it worth it for me to spend my free time playing 3/5. Definitely not bragging rights at all. The hours I've put in are all within this month. I just don't want to put in 40 hours per month for the next 3 years to find out it was all for none. With that said, based on the replies above (3,000 hours+), it looks like it might take me a few years to find out the true hourly anyways. Guess I'll keep going and see where it falls.

This is very helpful, thank you. If I keep my current pace (45 hours per month), looks like it might take me a few years to get to 2000 hours.

10bb/hour if your good or games are especially soft and your competent.

How you play has some impact on this as well. And I don't just mean your relative skill level to the player pool,although obviously that's a big part of it.

I think 2,000 hours is excessive, depending on how "sure" sure is.

The general rule is this: with a winrate of WR and standard deviation of SD, if you've played N = 4*(SD/WR)^2 hours, you can be "sure" you're some kind of a winner, although you won't really know how big of a winner you are. You may be a marginal winner running good or a solid winner running bad, but you're some kind of a winner.

For someone with SD = 80, WR = 10, that's a mere 250 hours. For SD = 80, WR = 5, that's 1,000 hours.

If you want to know your exact winrate, it's fairly straightforward to calculate off of N. Take the fraction error you're willing to tolerate and square it, and divide N by that number. So if you want to know your exact winrate to +/- 10%, it's N/(0.1^2) = 100*N, if you want your exact winrate to +/- 50%, it's 4*N.

Chasing your exact winrate to high precision is a fool's errand unless you destroy a game for an extended period. For recreational players, playing to 1*N is probably sufficient.