Wow, this is like the perfect guide to crushing $2/5. You can make more than $25/hr playing TAG though and easily more than $30/hr (# quoted earlier in thread), although $30/hr is not bad.

Ive been playing poker online for about ~3 years now, this year i started going to my local casino where i play 2-5 and so far ive booked 90 hour with a 6.4k profit so thats about 71$/hour.

Obviously not sustainable but i still think ~45$/hour in 2-5 is doable for a solid player, the live games are just sooo much softer than online ones...

Sorry for joining this thread so late. After reading this thread, I became curious as to what my winrate has been. I keep a log of my poker sessions and decided to review it and sort by level. I started playing 1/2 NL live in July 2006 (after primarily playing 10/20 LHE live) and put in 879 hours to date with a profit of $23.50/hour, or 11.75 bb/hr live.

In September 2007 I started playing primarily 2/5 NL. I've put in 541.5 hours and have averaged almost $73/hour, or ~14.5 bb/hr. This includes -$800 and -$1,400 sessions as my two most recent sessions.

I don't think I can sustain this winrate if I were to play full-time. As it is, I play in Vegas for one full week during July (WSOP time) and several times during the year around major holidays. I live three hours away from Atlantic City and head up there maybe 10 weekends a year. So I rarely play when the tables are full of nits and often benefit from drunks and other action junkies (I'm actually an action junkie myself).

I don't know what my true, long-term winrate is (if there is such a thing; so much of my profit is a result of being at the right table at the right time), but when I play 2/5 NL live I expect to make $100/hour and am disappointed if I don't make $50/hr. Live poker is still pretty juicy, at least at the levels I play.

One more opinion can't hurt. FWIW, I've played live, almost exclusively limit, for almost 20 years, and have played NL for quite a while now, all in Southern California casinos, and Vegas a few times a year. I played middle and high stakes limit, and now play 5-10 NL mostly, sometimes higher, but I haven't had much sucess in the bigger games. I played online a couple years, but not any more. I probably get in 600 to 800 hands a week, live.

Although nowhere near some of the winrates claimed here, I've been able to be a winner the last, oh 8 or 9 years I'd say. Nothing spectacular, but winning is winning.

My estimates, and they are pure conjecture, albeit based on years of observation, are that maybe 60% of live players are solid losers. A small percentage of those losing players have changed, and become break-evens, but not many.

I'd say another 35% are break even players, or maybe small winners/losers. And finnally, I think only about 5% of players are what I would call solid winners.

My estimates are based not only on what I see players win/lose on a weekly basis, but on how they play. Very few players play good NL hold 'em, and most play just plain bad. Many are in the middle, mixing in good play, but have tilt episodes or make other huge emotionally driven mistakes, making them long term losers. I don't need to see 50K hands to know if a live player is a long term winner or loser. I usually need to see just a single session of a player to have a pretty good clue. Frankly, I usually know within an hour or two if a totally new player is trouble or not.

In the end, I think if you're making 3 to 5 BB per hour live, you're a damn fine player. If you're making 10 or more BB/hr, you are in an elite class of card player. That's my experience anyway.

On a side note, I've never understood why online games would be so much tougher than live, but since so many people repeat the same observation, I guess I kind of assume it's true.

Best of luck all!

Just to give you another example, my NL100 online winrate over about 460,000 hands is 4.3BB/100 and my live winrate playing 2/3 NL is just under $20/h over a sample of just over 1,000 hours

someone made this as an OP in brick and mortor... got locked obv...

A little background. I'm an ex-professional gamblooor, who went busto thanks to blackjack leaks. I quit playing online after the UIGEA bullsh**t. I travel for work, making my own schedule and get to spend time as a "semi-pro" 5-10NL B&M player these days. This is my first year at the 5-10NL level. I don't play a ton, but I want to know if my sample size from this year is large enough to give me an accurate idea for my winrate at 5-10NL. I'll be grinding the Bellagio tonight through the weekend, so I'm sure to see some familiar faces.

2008 basic stats as of today August 26th.:
Profit: $19,430
Hrs Played: 375.5
$/hr: $51.74
Avg hrs played per month: roughly 50.


March was my only losing month, but I only played 20 hrs. For what it's worth, I like the balance of having a steady paycheck, but it is a little tilting when this year my poker hourly wage has been double of that of my day job.

I've been playing primarily live poker at the 2/5 and 5/10 levels for almost two years now. I track my results by keeping a journal with which I'm VERY disciplined about accurately logging my results and graphing my averages. So I can confidently say over the past year I've averaged 8.8bb/100, with consistent stretches of regularly clocking 13bb/100. The reason my win rate has averaged at eight is that it includes the first several months of my live play in which I hadn't fully adjusted to the new dynamics and didn't feel fully comfortable, which I'm sure cost me a ton of value. Therefore, I could estimate that 10bb/100 is not only totally realistic, but a bit conservative if you really know how to play these suckers for max value. Keep in mind the majority of players are incredibly loose/passive, and play their hands face up by consistently betting in easily identifiable patterns.

I can safely say that in a large portion of my live sessions, I never have to worry about being checkraised. Players will c/c any bets with draws, and lead out with made hands, sizing their bets based on only their hand strength. Who doubts that 10bb/100 is easy in a game where you always know where your at?

I asked a live pro and he said that a good player, on average makes about 110/hour playing 10/20 NL live. Does that sound about right?

So what does that come out to per hour at 5/10? Looks like $40/hr or so.

I'd bet a good amount of money that I could win at way >40$/hr playing 2/5nl live over x # of hands. I'd also be willing to put money on a ton of posters in this forum if they got a little live experience under their belts.

But fwiw, most live donks will claim to have some high hourly in their games. The reality is that very very few of them do. Most who make these claims would be v v close t BE or are super small winners.

i play deepstacked 2/5... definately get 50 an hour

i always tip so much that any profit is out of question..

i mean ptbb when i say bb

i always lol atpeople like this... tipping some dealer 50 dollars for winning a big pot...i just don't get it

if they have money, y not?

Yes, but definately not the max.

givinh unnecessary amounts of money to poker dealers... wouldn't you have more fun just giving 100 dollar bills to poor people yousee around town

because they didn't deal you straight flush>full house

I hope you are correct as what you describe is exactly the way I play. I have been running at $51/hr for about 400 hours and figured that I was just running incredibly well and that my theoretical could be half or even a third of what I was seeing. I play in a 2/5 game with a max buyin of $1K, or you can match the biggest stack at the table. If nobody has more than 1K then 1K is the max. There are very few good players.

I play mostly LHE, 20/40 and 30/60 but am trying to gradually move to NL because there are so few LHE games. If $40 to $50 per hour is doable, then NL could actually be as profitable as mid-limit LHE.

I am still very skeptical and am waiting for my big losing streak. But much of my feeling is based on the miniscule w/100 rates that I see from online pros who say they are "crushing" a game. If 12bb/100 is crushing a game, and nothing bigger is realistic, then that would translate to only about 3bb/hr live, which makes it hardly worth while for a pro.

agree with dachan 100%..A lot of live player have a Ego problem and if you show some bluffs and crazy moves there, the bad players who cant adjust to anything you do will pay you off everytime you hit a monster...
I am playing live 100NL atm and made somethings about 3k€ in last 3 weeks..
This is somethings about 30€/h...
And I am a breakeven 50NL onlineplayer.
There is such a big gap of skillevel between online and livepoker thats unbeliveble...

Assuming you're equally good at both games, 1-2 NL plays ~10/20 and 2-5 plays ~20/40 in terms of $/hr expectancy.

I think what you are saying would be true if there were an equal number of decent players in both cases. I am a much better LHE player than NL player. But at LHE you are hoping for one or two rather poor players to be at your table. At NL there are usually five or six, at least. So, even as a novice NL player, I am making much more at 2/5 than I make at 20/40, but not as much as I make at 30/60 LHE.

I'm talking Vegas here. California could be different in term of ratios of good to bad players at the two types of games. Mid-limit LHE games are not that soft in Vegas.

It's very hard to get a live sample that is large enough for anyone to say that they have achieved this or that winrate with accuracy. Generally speaking online 50K hands is a good enough sample. Live if we have 30 hands per hour, you reach 50K hands after almost 1700 hours. If you put in 30 hours a week which is a full-time job if you include meal breaks and travel time to/from, that is almost 60 weeks. So you really need to play AT THE SAME LIMITS full-time every week without vacation for an entire year to be able to say "I achieved $50 per hour at 2/5 playing live". So anyone who says I've played a few hundred hours and achieved this winrate at this level live needs to know that they might just be running hot because the sample size is really tiny compared to what is considered a reliable sample size for online play.

Also, most people if they play live that much at a certain limit, they've either already gone busto or moved up.

That's why the winrate online is much more accurate because you can get to 50K hands a month at a particular level reasonably easily if you can multi-table.

Can't it be both? Can't someone state their historical win rate playing 2/5 live over X number of hours and recognize that it may not be indicative of a sustainable win rate over the long term?

Of course it is a tiny sample... and this was sort of my point. I was highly skeptical of this being my true win rate and wanted to find out if it was realistic. At LHE, a good live pro wins, at the middle limits, about 3X as much in terms of BB per 100 as an online pro. One BB per hour (about 30 to 33 hands) compares to about 1 BB per /100 online. If the same holds true at NL, where bb/100 online compares to bb/hour in the casino, then $50 per hour should be as doable as 10bb/100 online is. But, is 10bb/100 online doable?

And I'm talking about .10/.25 online, not 2/4.