Up here, from what I've read of Montreal/Toronto threads in the Venues forum, they are also in the same ballpark. I recently played in a room on the east coast that only had a max rake of $7 (which was last seen in my room in early 2018). So actually very thankful for my $9 max rake out here.

Fairly mind boggling that there are apparently still rooms out there with $5 max rakes, lol.

GcluelessmorerakeisbetternoobG

My $2-$100 spread-limit game’s rake is just 10% up to $4. No complaints!

Lol, the last time a game in our poker room had a $4 rake was in 2009. They had just increased the rake in the Limit game from $3 to $4. The $1 increase meant I could no longer beat the lowly 2/4 Limit game (which I had been rocking a $2/hr winrate in) and meanwhile the 4/8 Limit (with kill!) game had just died off (Limit itself would be completely dead within a few years). So I was forced to go off to the dark side and try NL (and haven't looked back).

GwouldliketotakearideinDave'stimemachineG

My October would be looking so pretty if only I had resisted the siren call of Omaha!

My Oct sucks so far. I hit a period of gross runbad early in the month. Including a cool 0 for 7 streak with AA/KK. Been able to climb back to even for the month but can't really say the runbad is over. Just manifested itself in cold cards instead of bad beats. I've been dealt AA once in my last 16 hrs and it lost to an A4 after flopping top set to running straight cards. Still have a few more sessions left in the month to finish strong but it could be my first losing month since I started playing again about a year and a half ago.

I play frequently in a live game with 3/3 blinds. I have collected enough results data (> 25,000 hands) to calculate my win rate, expressed in big blinds per 100 hands (bb/100).

Players in the game frequently straddle and I have realized that I need to adjust my win rate for these straddles which make the "effective average bb" bigger than the standard $3 bb. I have not yet recorded how frequently pots are straddled, but when I have that data I will calculate an effective average bb (which will be higher than $3 and I guess might be as high as $4.50). Then I can express a true win rate in effective bb/100.

My purpose is to use this true win rate to project my win rate in another bigger game at a different venue where straddling is much less frequent. (I also need to adjust projected results for a different rake structure and tipping practice, but that is straightforward.)

I'd be grateful for your comments and any pointers to help me solve this problem! Thanks!

Crown Casino in Melbourne Australia has recently raised their rake from 10% capped at $15 to 10% capped at $25
Also they have stopped offering 1/3
Lowest stakes now are 2/5 with optional straddle, buy in 300-1000
5/10 optional straddle is the same rake with buy in from 500-1500

Say I had a win rate of $30 per hour at 2/5 when the rake was capped at $15
What would you expect that win rate to be with the new $25 cap?

I have not played a session since the rake increase but I assume there are many 1/3 players buying in for 300 at the 2/5 tables which is not good.

Welcome to the forum. Live winrates are usually not expressed in bb/100, but in bb/hr. Also, be wary of "true winrates," as confidence intervals are pretty wide in live poker, even with a thousand hour sample (which is about what it sounds like you have, maybe a bit less), and different levels/venues play differently enough that you can't just extrapolate your dat from this game to that one.

That said, if you are winning at 10bb/hr (even without considering the straddle effects) at the local equivalent of 1/3 over that large sample size, you should be fine moving to the equivalent of 2/5. Expect your bb/hr to drop a little as you face better players, but once you adjust, your $/hr will likely be higher. It is pretty common for a 1/3 player moving to 2/5 to drop from around 10bb/hr to around 7bb/hr, for example, but that's still a move from $30/hr to $35/hr.

Personally i would strongly consider if that game is worth playing, cause that is some serious amount of money coming off the table. If everybody buys in for a 1000 at the 2/5 it should be plenty beatable still unless the playerpool is very tough/reggy,but if many players buys in for the minimum of 300 its just gonna be the casino raking the game to death.

Meh, I wouldn't get sidetracked too much by all of this for many reasons.

First, it looks like you have ~830 hours or so under your belt. I have a 1307 hour sample size where I won 31% of what I won over another 1014 hour sample size... all in the exact same game. Sure, you'll probably be able to tell whether you are a solid winner versus breakeven versus solid loser over lol ~1000 sample sizes, but you'll never have much of a handle of exactly where you are to the second decimal point (which you seem to be attempting).

Second, as G says above, it's highly unlikely your results will scale linearly based on blind sizes due to the competition likely (possibly?) being better.

Also, winrates are likely much more based around average stack size than they are around average blind size. For instance, you'll likely have the opportunity shipping a much bigger winrate in a lowly 1/2 NL game that is uncapped with everyone sitting at $2K versus a "higher" 2/5 NL game that has a capped BI of $500.

GgoodluckG

Interesting question, imo.

My guess is that there is some threshold revolving around average pot size compared to rake where the rake increase actually won't make as much difference as we think.

For example, think of a typical LLSNL 1/3 NL game where the average stack is like $300 and you almost never see a pot bigger than $1000. And now let's say you start with a 10% rake up to a ridiculous maximum of $100 (so rake is maxed out only in those incredibly rare $1000 pots). And then the next day it goes up to an insane maximum of $1000. Well, even though the increase in maximum rake is insane, it would actually have almost no difference on ones winrate.

In your case, the maximum rake was reached at $150 pot. But now all the pots from $150 to $250 will also be raked. So it really depends on your style as well as how the game plays overall. If your game plays small / tight and you play a smallball style yourself, and most of the pots you win are < $150, then the increase in rake won't have a massive effect. But if the game plays bigger / large and you mostly play $150++ pots, then this increase will definitely have a big affect. Although even this doesn't tell the whole story (as your bigger pot players are paying more rake off their stack, which reduces how much you win off of them when you stack them).

I've been thinking about this for my 1/3 NL game as well, which has gone from maximums of $5 to $6 to $7 to $8 and now $9 (and undoubtedly will keep rising). My initial guesstime was that for each $1 increase in rake that it affects my winrate by about 2/3rds of a bb/hr. But, I've also been thinking that as it goes up by $1 increments that the effect on bb/hr goes slightly down (as those bigger size pots become that less common).

All-in-all, obviously not a good thing, but also very difficult to get an exact handle on the exact affect, imo.

Ggoodlucktousall,imoG

Not sure on true winrate, it would depend on how many hands you win an hour on average and what the average pot size is. That rake structure incentivizes you to play fewer hands, but play for stacks as much as possible so your pots hit the $250 threshold. I would not play in a game that raked $15 let alone $25. I would guess the extra 10 in rake costs you close to 15 to 20 an hour.

I've done a few rough calcs on the impact of the $25 cap on the 2/5 game at Crown. In short, my estimate is that the $25 cap, on average, will reduce win-rates by 2 bbs per hour.

The week before the introduction of the $25 cap, I counted the rake taken, over a period of one hour, on four separate tables at Crown. While the sample is clearly too small to be conclusive, I found the range of the times the $15 cap was reached to be relatively tight (between 10 and 12, with the hands per hour between 29 and 37). On average the $15 cap was reached 35%. I didn't record how often the straddle was on in this sample, but, as you'd expect, the cap appeared to be reached more often if there was a straddle.

Generally, if there was a straddle and there was a bet on river, the $15 cap was reached. If there were more than two players in a pot that was bet on the flop and turn, the $15 cap was likely reached. As you know, the 2/5 games at Crown often go multiway, over multiple streets, so the chances of the pot being $250 or more are relatively high.

Anyhow, I believe the best approach to calculating the impact of the $25 cap on win-rates is to ask how often there will a pot be greater than $150 and how often will there be a pot of at least $250. If we safely assume that 35% of the time a pot will reach $150, then I'm guessing, based on my experience of these games, around 70% of these $150 pots will reach $250. So, if we multiple 0.75 by 0.35 we get 26.25%.

If we assume 33 hands per hour, with 8 players at the table, that means, on average, we're individually paying rake on 4 hands per hour. So that means 1/4 of these hands (roughly 26.25% of the time) we will pay $10 more per hour (2bbs) than we would if the cap was $15 rather than $25.

Of course, we have to consider the fact that winning players pay more rake on average because they win a greater percentage of pots played. There is also the consideration of relative VPIP and how often a player wins when they get to the river. Finally, the impact of the straddle and $1000 buy-in are significant. I would be interested in data on how often pots get comparatively large (e.g > $300) and whether the EV of winning players is much greater in these situations (which, intuitively, I believe is the case, as goobledygeek hints at by talking about the pot-size to rake ratio).

Much of the above is needless speculation given that I haven't played since the rake increase and have no plans on doing so, either. If you were beating the game for 6bbs per hour, you were doing very well, considering you were probably paying 7bbs in rake per hour. Now you'll probably be paying 9bbs per hour in rake. So, to maintain your win-rate you'll have to be 15 bbs better per hour than other players at the table --- that's a tough ask. In short, as you probably know, the minimum wage in Melbourne is around $23 per hour. I would say the very best 2/5 players will struggle to earn more than this figure now that dealers at Crown are able to drop a green chip into the box.

short answer is you don't have a projected win rate for the larger game because your sample size is 830 hours which is fairly meaningless in the long run.

I have a somewhat similar situation in terms of not knowing what the true level of blinds I play at is. Today I played 1/2 where the straddles were between 5 and 10, while I waited for 1/3, then went to 1/3 where the straddles were between 6 and 15, then I went to 1/2/5 where the straddles were between 10 and 25. That game broke so I went back to 1/2, then went a 2/5 round of each PLO and holdem, and finally I went back to 1/3 until I left. I won a whopping 941 over 2 hours and 28 minutes after paying the time rake. There is no way I would record a different session every time I switched a game. Forget about trying to figure out what my win rate is in terms of bb or straddles per hour.

This is a pretty extreme example. Usually I am playing 5/5 the whole time, but sometimes I will play some 1/2 or 1/3 while I wait for a seat. And occasionally I move to a bigger game if it runs. And my average session is about 6-7 hours, not 2.5.

The 5/5 is the hardest game to understand what the blinds really are, because it can be 5/5/10/20 for most of the table, sometimes it can fo up to 40, 80, or more. And other times when the game sucks half the table doesn't straddle at all.

All this to say I too would like to know how many blinds/straddles I am winning per hour, but I am just not going to try that hard. I am kind of content knowing my historical hourly in dollar terms, and knowing that in terms of bankroll management I probably would not assume a win rate was more than 10bb per hour. Better yet, assume your win rate is smaller when looking at bankroll/variance calculators and just nake sure yiu are well within your risk tolerance.
Lastly, I know I can withstand the infamous 20 buy in down swing when it comes.

Thanks for your response! While I accept there are problems extrapolating data from one game to another, I am nevertheless attempting to do just that! After all, what better basis is there than past results?

Let me restate my real question. Firstly, please just set aside the issues of rake, tipping, time, competition, etc. and let's focus on how to manage only the "straddle factor".

Assume we are playing in a 5/10 game and have calculated our win rate by taking the amount of money won (let's say $100,000) and dividing it by the number of hands played (say 50,000). We then take that result ($2) and express it in big blinds per 100 hands (100 x 2/10) for a win rate of 20 bb/100. Easy! And I think that's as far as most players go when calculating their win rate. But that rate is quite false if the pots are frequently straddled, is it not?

Say that in our 5/10 game the pots are straddled half the time to 5/10/20. We didn't win our $100,000 in a game with $10 big blinds! Half the time our game was played with $20 big blinds. The average big blind was $15. If we take our win rate of 20 bb/100 (which assumes one bb equals $10) and adjust it for the reality that the game plays with an average bb of $15, then our true win rate is 13.33 bb/100.

If we move up to a 50/100 game with no straddles, at a consistent win rate we should expect to win $1,333 per 100 hands (not the $2,000 falsely projected by a win rate that fails to account for straddling in the 5/10 game).

Do you agree that straddling needs to be accounted for in this way? Is my method sound? When "poker experts" quote and discuss win rates, do they account for straddling or do they just deceive themselves?

Thanks for your comments!

Thanks for your response!

Your point about win rates being more affected by average stack size than average blind size is interesting, and not a factor that I've considered. But is it true? Can you elaborate and provide some numbers to illustrate?

Thanks!

The straddle should be accounted for, but it is hard to do so. The short answer is your win rate is probably going to be closer to whatever your current win rate is in terms of the average BB or straddle size per hour than ir will be just in terms of BB per hour in the presence of straddles. But at the end of the day, trying to extrapolate our win rate to other stakes is going to be of limited practical use.

I think the the age old standard of 10bb per hour being crushing it is probably not talking about straddled games. The real problem that people have alluded to is that every game is different. I have played 10/25 games with whales that were worst than most 1/2 games. But in the 1/2 games, the standard open raise is to at least $10 unstraddled and the straddle is $10 fairly often, where as the straddle is the 10/25 game is rarely up to $125.

We can try to figure out how to compare apples to oranges all day, but what do we really get out of it?

In general, unless it is a really good game, I would assume that the higher the stakes, the lower the win rate in terms of bb/straddles because there will be more pros.

At the end of the day, you're just never going to be able to find out your 2/5 or 5/10 win rate from your 1/2 win rate or anything like that. All you can do is take shots and find out.

Probably not necessarily what OP wants to hear after diligently tracking his results as a method of guesstimating how he'll do at other steaks, but this would be my take as well.

GgoodluckOP!G

Thanks!

There's no question that knowing the "true bb" (i.e., the standard bb plus straddles) goes directly to bankroll requirement. At the same bb, I would need a bigger bankroll to play in a game with straddles than without.

Nothing wrong with perhaps eyeing the bigger game while you're playing your smaller game and then maybe taking a shot at jumping in if you feel the line-up is ok. And then evaluate how often you do this given results / bankroll / life roll / etc.

Ggoodluck!G

It's going to be impossible to accurately track straddled games over the long term. The other thing to remember is that as go up in stakes not only do the stakes get higher, but also the level of competition.

I've always felt that tracking live results is overrated and you can't really know much besides if you are a winning player or not. See e.g. the 500 people in this thread who've posted about making $45/hr at 1/3 and should they quit their job.

Pots vary a lot in size and a few big ones can affect things. The games are different. Friday night is different than tuesday. How often were you there when the drunk rich guy was? The player pool as a whole gets better/the worst players go broke or quit. Your own play is changing. The economy is changing.

So obviously I think isolating even smaller samples from your already too-small sample or trying to project this game to that game will get you nowhere.

You should have an identifiable edge. Like, would you rather bet with someone who can see the BJ dealers hole cards, or someone who is winning at BJ over a small sample? You should be able to identify edges in a poker game too. Other players make mistakes you don't make. You make good plays few, if any, other players at the table make. This can be hard to know and people are great at self deception, but that's part of why the game exists. Hopefully, you are making these judgements based on things you've learned from your studies, while the other players are basing their "knowledge" on stuff like "I always lose with jacks."

Reached the $120K milestone at 1/3 NL last night.

Only took me ~14 years / 754 sessions / 5795 hours / 1 pandemic to do so!

Gintheracebetweentortoiseandhare,I'msnailG

Not bad for a hobby. Most cost money