Only winning players have bankrolls, for everyone else poker is an expense that must be funded by another source of income.

My guess is that like most live players you don't track your play but rely on your awesome memory.

Track your play for free on www.pokerdominator.com

Without knowing your winrate, it is impossible to tell you what bankroll you need. But the generic answer is 20 buy-ins.

Of course, if you have a steady source of income that you can pump into your poker roll then the requirements lower.

Lastly, read the official bankroll and winrate thread on this forum to get a better understanding of what is required.

My god-on-a-bicycle run good mode at 1/3 NL continues.

Played a 12 hour session yesterday and booked my 3rd biggest win ($1223 = $407.67 bb).

Table was crazy deep when I first joined in the morning. One guy had the most chips I've ever seen on a 1/3 table = ~$3600, while another guy probably had close to the second most I've seen = ~$2200. Crazy action, including two guys shooting it blind for $700 each (74o > 62o, fwiw). Action then petered out thru out the day, only to pick up again crazily at night (such as the awesomeness of one guy shipping $700 with AA into a $100 pot on the flop vs two guys who covered him and both had him beat, plus awesome noob who liked to bet $10 on every street into like $300 pots, etc.), but unfortunately I just couldn't find any hands to get involved with these jokers otherwise I'm sure I would have booked my best ever session.

After a slow start to the year, my past 238.4 hours I'm running at an insane $46.92/hr (15.64 bb/hr).

I've also come full circle. The last time my overall winrate was > $27/hr (9 bb/hr) was at the running good 117 hour mark ($33.90/hr), and now at the 888.6 hour mark I've finally gotten back to it again ($27.89/hr).

I also continue crushing at 10+ hour sessions, which I of course only put in on a weekend/holiday (perhaps easier crowd? or I have more patience?), so much so that I'm honestly thinking of always playing my once weekly session on the weekend (and never going after work during the week). 17-2 running at $51.68/hr (17.23 bb/hr), with my 2 losses being for rather lol amounts of -$103 and -$12 respectively.

I mean, it can't really be this easy, can it?

GlaughinginthefaceofthedoomswitchG

ITS 15 bb/HR NOT 15 BB/HR!!!

*all of my rage*

Fixed!

GbacksawayslowlyG

you are guaranteed to lose 10+ buyins at some point

Very nice gg! (or GG?).

Update: I won $600 last Saturday.

Now my BR is $2000 (plus ~$300 for christmas gifts). My stats:

Winrate = $10.8195/hour over 645.5 hours
Standard deviation = ~$46/hour
Session win % = 61.9%
Session lose% = 38.1%

My risk of ruin should now be less than 2%...two different ROR calculators that I found online gave me this figure. But did I make a mathematical mistake, or are the calculators unreliable? Given my stats, does less than 2% ROR sound reasonable?

Lol no quite as many hours but at 1/2 I'm at 43.7/hr for the last 127 hours.
Runnin good feels good.

I wonder how it feels to play poker and be a consistent loser? Is it any part of it fun? Even though I love relaxing at the table on a day off and playing cards and having a laugh or two, my guess is that perhaps poker as a pasttime might suck if we always lost.

GhopefullywillneverhavetotestthattheoryoutG

well you don't always lose ldo

What do you think it's like to play any casino game then? Many of them win just often enough to keep coming. And they certainly aren't tracking their losses, knowing you spewed $2,000 this year in poker might drive a behavior change.

I think a large majority of players don't expect to lose money. And when they do its "just bad luck" which is why they come back. It always tilts me when a fish racks up 1k and leaves, (cause its not in my stack) but that's at least what keeps them coming back.

What was the longest breakeven stretch in that period? What was the biggest downswing?

Why do people go to casinos and gamble? Same thing.

I'm assuming period = my overall hours at 1/3 NL = 888.6 hours.

Longest breakeven stretch was the first 21 sessions of this year, where I only won $300 in 138.8 hrs ($2.16/hr).

In 129 sessions, I have twice recorded a 4 session losing streak.

My biggest downswing I've done twice, both -4.57 BI (BI = 100 bbs) over 3 sessions and 4 sessions, respectively. I was down -5 BI within a session within a downswing recently, but managed to correct that before the session was over.

I'm going to post a poobah thread with all these stats when I reach 1000 hrs sometime next year.

Thank you, I was interested. You really do crush those games then. Have you played 1/3 anywhere else? How do your games compare to those?

No, pretty much the majority of my NL sessions are all at one casino (less than 10 NL sessions at other casinos), although the neighbouring casinos do have a similar and overlapping clientele. I have have zero experience with NL anywhere else (such as Las Vegas, L.A., etc.) so I would have no opinion on how my game compares (other than my guess being "very good" since I feel I'm a mediocre player and yet I seem to be doing fairly well).

I have the same kind of stats on my 10-12 hr sessions as you. I'm at something like 19-3 so it's definitely a recurring theme. I had similar downswing and breakeven stretches as you until a recent 8 bi downswing over 12 hours. It was like a mythical beast I had no idea could ever happen. It was super standard just really bad.

It's always possible and sometimes the poker gods just line things up that way. During my most recent "downswing" I ran KK into AA twice in one session.

And even though I just booked my 3rd best session, full disclosure: I got my money in bad in both of the two biggest pots I won (although I wouldn't have played them any other way and think they were 100% standard spots).

Why do you think this is?

I'm guessing mine is cuz I usually attempt to put in longer sessions when a good BBJ crowd is there, so perhaps the opponents are just that much worse. Plus I can be super patient and just wait for spots since I'm going to be at the table all day (I don't have to make stuff happen right now).

But I don't know if those are cop outs. The crowd is usually from the same player pool, more or less. And I'm a fairly patient player anyways. For example, if I haven't played a hand for whatever reason in an hour and look down at AJo in LP and I'm all excited to raise it, and then a reasonable player opens UTG, I insta-muck whether I'm at hour 4 of a 6 hour session or hour 2 of a 12 hour session.

The only other thing that makes sense is that playing for so long enables us to build a big chip stack and play deepstack poker. But (a) I don't think I'm very good at deepstack poker and (b) I can't really recall any of my huge wins coming due to stack deepness. I basically just nickle and dime it.

It's a weird stat. But as I think M stated earlier, it might just be as simple as: variance.

I think the answer is super simple. I'm just happier and having more fun when I'm winning so I stay. 12 hours is my cap and I pretty much never go any longer than that because I would fall asleep. If I drop 2 bi slowly over the course of 5 hours I'm more prone to pick up and go home and enjoy the rest of my night. For you it might be different though.

in terms of live win rates, my estimate is that good players can realisticly expect to make up to
- 10-12 bb/hr at tables with a max buyin of 100 BB (often 1/2, 1/3, 2/5)
- up to 20 bb/hr with deeper stacks (>250 bb) at 2/5 (especially with deep stacks AND straddles!)
- 10-12 bb/hr at 5/10 (assuming mixed competition with some regs and some fish)
higher numbers are certainly possible, but somewhat rare I guess)

also, I would think win rates start to get reliable around 300-400 hrs. (of course, this is not an exact science either. As stated before, higher winrates require a smaller sample size to become reliable, so maybe >200 hrs for 10-15 bb, >400 hrs at 5 bb).

All those numbers are just a rough estimate of mine, and they are based on my personal observations (live and on 2p2).

As a sidenote, I noticed that a couple of you winning guys here (who have numbers similar to those mentioned above) posted that they book a winning session about 2/3 of the time, and have a loosing session about 1/3 of the time. It might just be a coincidence, but I do find the same pattern in my stats.

Ya, 70/30 is pretty good makeup.

I can lose twice as much as I win on an average session and still come out ahead.

Lose 500 x 30 = 15000

Win 250 x 70 = 17500

Net = $2500.

I play to a predetermined time every session (usually 9:30pm), win or lose, so this obviously has no bearing on my results.

Ya, me too, my session winrate is around 71% right now.