What table count and what stakes you need to play to realistically make 25$/h these days?

Easily doable with 15 avg buyin and 10 tables

To make $25 per hour playing on-line MTTs is pretty hard these days imo.

To make $25 per hour at a 10% roi you would have to wager on average $250 per hour. In reality you do not get a perfect choice of how to wager this amount as expensive tournaments are few to start and far between.

Warning: the following assumes a very simple model of just a 10% roi. Don't read on if you are of a nervous disposition.

For a very simple model lets say you always played 180 seat ones and these take about 5 hours to actually bink/win one but you usually last on average perhaps 2 hours. Sometimes an individual one will only last minutes, sometimes 5 hours but on average 2 hours regardless of the amount of concurrent tables you are playing or the buy-in amount.

So one way to earn $25 per hour would be to play one table of $512, this way you as you last about 2 hrs you wager $256 on average per hour. (I picked 512 as it can be halved many times) and earn 10% roi = ~$25 per hour.

Lets also say that you could play 2 concurrent tables of $256 ones and again still have 10% in each (easier field, but twice as many decisions balances out the roi. In this model each still lasts on average 2 hours and in each you have 10% roi). So now you are playing on average 2 in every two hours, you again wager $256 per hour and get a return of 10%.

If you played these for 8 hours a day on average (this is a simple model, but for eg, balanced over several days you typically played 4 x $512 per day or 8 x $256 per day etc)

If you played 200 days in a year so that is like having 2 days off each week and a few bank holidays, 3 weeks of hols and perhaps 30 days combined for study and "the variance is killing me, I need to stop!" days. You would play 200 x 4 = 800 games of $512 or 1600 games of $256 etc.

The variance per game measured in BI's is the same for all games, assuming the same finish distribution in each, hence giving the same 10% roi.

The $variance per game is proportional to the BI squared, so the variance in $ is 4 times as big for one $512 game as for one $256

The actual variance per game in $ will be approx
6851149 for the $512
1712787 for the $256

but we play 2 x the amount of games for $256 as for $512 and this doubles the variance seen per hour or year.

At the end of a 200 working days year you would have a variance of:

$512 ==> 6851149 * 8 * 0.5 * 200 = 5480919200 so sd = sqrt(5480919200), sd = $74033.23

$256 ==> 1712787 * 8 * 1 * 200 = 2740459200 so sd = sqrt(2740459200), sd =$52349.39

$128 ==> 428196 * 8 * 2 * 200 = 1370227200 so sd = sqrt(1370227200), sd = $37016.58

$64 ==> 107049 * 8 * 4 * 200 = 685113600 so sd = sqrt(685113600), sd = $26174.67

$32 ==> 26762 * 8 * 8 * 200 = 342553600 so sd = sqrt(342553600), sd = $18508.20

The amount you earned on average is exactly the same for each of the buy-ins ($25 per hour) = 8 * 25 * 200 = $40000 per year.

It is pretty bad/great for the $512 buy-in player though, playing a total of 800 games, as 70% of the time in any year they earn somewhere within the range $40000 +/- $74000. About 15% of years they would lose more than $40000 - $74000 = -$34000 and about 15% earn more than $114000. Phew it's a tough way to earn a living playing a few $512 tournies per year at 10% roi.

Even the $32 player, 16 tabling, earns quite a wide (70% confidence interval) $40000 +/- $18508 from playing a total of 200 * 8 * 8 = 12800 games.

I suppose this is a very simple model. Any earned rake-back softens the bumps a little and generally I would hope that a full time professional would be able to muster more than 10% for MTTs although I do think multi-tabling 16 at 10% would be pretty hard.

Did not read any of that but it is not only doable but pretty easy. It really only comes down to two things: being able to play 10+ tables and game selection. Variance is another thing but that has nothing to do with hourly.

Depends on your bb/100. Let's say you crush the game and made 5bb/100. Let's say you can multitable up to 12 tables. Usually per table you get 80 hands/hour.

That means you play around 1000 hands/hour. You would made 50bbs then in that hour. As you want $25/hr that would mean you have to be playing at NL50

(Of course, is very tough to profit at 5BB/100 at NL50, and is even harder while playing 12 tables)

what ?

Yes, that's right, if you run to the lowest side of deviation for 80 million hands like some of us, it doesn't effect your hourly at all (y)

What about when you crush tournaments for 10bb/100 for 50,000 games yet still make 5% ROI? NOW WHAT?

Actually my bad, I thought I was on the cash section (That's why I put bb/100 not ROI).

On MTTs is a different story as 1) Not all start at the same hour 2) They can last from 3 hours to 12 hours

But here we go again: Assuming you crush the game and get 30-40% ROI (Let's put 35% to make this easy). Let's say you play on average 12 tables and the avg. time lenght per MTT is 6 hours. You register for up to 5 hours and end up grinding 9-10 hours per day on average. You grind around 30-35 MTTs per sesión.

So math: (Avg. buy-in*ROI*No MTTs)=Expected daily profit
Expected daily profit/No hours=Expected profit per hour

X*0.35*32=Y
Y/9.5=$25 -> Y=237.5

Then avg. buy-in=$21.2

do you gamble HUGE on the lottery every time its marginally plus ev? it has a great hourly!!! guess that falls into game selection but i imagine youll get my point

Pretty dumb comparison considering it's pretty easy to have a losing week 10% of the time while printing $25/hourly. And even if it weren't, hourly still has nothing to do with variance. If your long term hourly playing poker is x then it is x regardless of the variance involved. If you're looking for a variance-free hourly then you obviously can't play poker for a living.

was generally interested.. I personally do gamble on lottery when its plus ev. but obv smaller than i would on some other things (despite having a higher higherly bc of the std deviation). my point is that a lot of poker guys esp mtt players seem to only consider hourly, when it may takes YEARS to reach a 80% confidence, and that the poker economy generally changes every ~6months or so.. glgl at the tables