I try to only look at $/hr over a month or more ... anything else feels like it'd make me play worse.
Way too many times I see people want to leave because they are up a bit, or not want to leave because they are down a bit (which might be fine if there are a bunch of reasons and those are the ones you can articulate easily ... but mostly that's not the case IMO).
Also a bunch of times recently I've played when I knew I was playing for 2 hours or something.

Leaving when I'm playing bad or tilted is def. a significant skill, and staying when there's a big spot at the table is something I think most of us try to do.

I'm not sure what your point is or how your response relates to my post.

I do not leave early to lock up wins or play longer chasing losses. My average session length is just over 7 hours across this 9.7k hour sample.

My hourly and bb/hr are not something I'm sharing in an open forum.

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PS. Hourly over a month is meaningless.

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A quick look shows I have similar numbers over 6005 hours / 796 sessions in my 1/3 NL game.

Longest winning streaks: 15, 12 (once each)

Longest losing streak: 5 (once, with one of those being -$2 in a 12.5 hour session, lol)

5+ wins in a row: 35

4 losses in a row: 6

GcluelessuselessmetricsnoobG

How did you get your bankroll? Did you earn it only on poker? Did you invest in yourself? How much did you lose before you had 30 buyins?

Hello everyone, sorry if I did this wrong I’m new to 2 + 2. I was trying to get some tips on what a correct bankroll would be for a 1/2 or 1/3 NLH cash game at my local casino. I’ve played there only once before and the table is extremely soft. I only plan on playing one time per week so definitely not full time or even part time playing. 8 hrs a week I’d say. I do have a job as well. The game does play more like a 2-5 game but still a lot of short stacks, most people just raise to 15 pre, is why I say it plays more like a 2/5 game, is that a normal raise sizing most people use in 1/2 or 1/3 live? I don’t really have very many living expenses, I have a 2k bankroll as of right now.

To add a little more onto this, I’m not inexperienced. I have played for about 3 years now online, and am a winning player online. Just never really played much live since I just turned 21 a year ago.

If you have a job and thus no major concerns about risk-of-ruin, you should be fine to play with your $2k. These games are high variance, so there's a chance you bust it, but that's not a big deal if it happens, and the opportunity cost from saving up more to play is probably not worth it.

And yes, that sizing is pretty normal for a lot of 1/3 games, and even some 1/2 games. This makes effective stacks relatively short, thus making speculative hands less valuable and premiums even more valuable.

My Memorial Day session saw me reach the 600 hour milestone at $1-$2 (at $2-$100 spread-limit). My stats:

https://imgur.com/a/b28NrGW

$41/hour is better than most people’s 2/5 WRs. Good job!

Are there bigger games available to you?

Open size alone doesn’t really mean the game plays like a bigger game. Bigger open sizes just means the game will play shallower.

1/2 and 1/3 are notoriously low aggression games compared to 2/5 (not saying that 2/5 can’t ever be low aggression, it just typically has more). When a player is betting big on later streets, most of the 1/3 player pool will have a big hand. That starts to change when you start going up to 2/5 and bigger. More players at bigger games will be less afraid to run multi-street bluffs or make large dollar bluffs, so big bet doesn’t always equate to big hand.

More players in bigger games will also value bet thinner. It’s not uncommon for a 1/3 player to check a clean river with top pair good kicker when last to act because many 1/3 players are showdown monkeys. They can’t handle betting on the river, getting raised and then calling it off and losing more money so they just stop betting on rivers to avoid the situation all together unless they have extremely strong hands. Hell, some won’t bet extremely strong hands if a back door nut hand appears, even if it’s basically impossible for someone to have the specific holding required. They’ll just shrug and say “well 85 is the nuts and I can’t beat that” when the board is AK7[4][6] and they have pocket Aces and bet big preflop, on flop and turn. At 2/5 and higher, more players will value bet wider. It’s not unheard of to see someone make a river value bet with hands that are 2nd or 3rd pair.

Anyway, your questions… if losing that 2k doesn’t change your life one bit, I would play 1/3 until you get like 4k and then move to 2/5. Honestly, if it were me, a person who is comfortable at playing 2/5, I might even just start at 2/5 and skip 1/2 and 1/3 all together. 1/2 and 1/3 are rake traps and they are difficult to beat long term. Typically rooms will drop the same max $ amount for rake regardless of 1/2, 1/3, or 2/5, so you want to get to $5 blind level as quickly as possible because the rake will be a smaller % of the pot sizes.

As far as the raise size, I don’t play 1/2 really ever anymore, they stopped spreading it in all but 1 casino near me, so idk what the average raise size is. I would guess $10, but that’s a guess. I play 1/3 ($500 cap) when I’m waiting for a bigger game, most open sizes tend to be $12 or $15. Very rarely do people go smaller. Often people will go bigger to “protect their hand”, which just telegraphs their hand strength. I would pick a size when you sit down and go with it and vary when fish are left to act behind you.

Good luck!

Thank you!

The only larger games available to me would be things like 20/40 or 40/80 Limit Hold’em, which I avoid because I simply haven’t studied LHE and would surely get run over. (I also doubt I could handle the variance.)

I live in Minnesota, which has a state law limiting the size of poker bets to $100. So even the $1-$2 game I play isn’t pure “no-limit”—if I bet $40 on the River and you have the nuts, you can’t raise all-in, the most you can raise to is $140.

So there is no $2-$5 game I can move up to—they don’t exist here.

Thanks a lot this was really informative, I appreciate it!

Hello,

If we say 7bb is attainable at 2/5 in a 100bb game. What do you think is possible in a 300bb game of $1500?


Bonus Question

Do you think you would make more money taking that $1500 and playing 5/10 with a 150bb stack?

Lets say the table conditions are pretty similar. But the 5/10 game has two other regs of a higher caliber.

Depends on the game and the open sizes.

For example some 1/3 games are better than 2/5 games.

Over a large sample if the players were the exact same you would make more at the 5/10 because the pots would get bigger quicker. A 7bb win rate at 2/5 is nothing too spectacular though, and you probably have some leaks if you aren't pulling 10bb+ an hour over a large sample even at 100bb live poker.

I've known some crushers who making 12bb+ for a full year before moving up. One guy was up to $100 an hour at 200bb 2/5 before moving up (i'm pretty sure he was on a heater for the whole year) but it's quite possible to really crush live players if you get good tables with a lot of action and poor play.

A lot of these players are short lived for the game. They make a lot of money and get tired of playing the same stakes and will eventually move up to where they only play once in a while (big easy games don't run as often) or they quit and do other things with their life. It's very rare to find a massive crusher who just wants to play poker all day in and out and not enjoy the windfall of money.

Thanks. That is a helpful way of thinking of it.

I had a coach tell me the 10bb per 100 thing is likely a myth. Simply because no one really ever obtains a long enough sample size to really tell playing live. That really has me wondering how to ever really tell its time to try higher limits. Once you understand the framework and have the bankroll, perhaps its best not to waste too much time trying to build a large sample size like you would online.

I dont think there's anybody making more than $50/hr @ 2/5 over a meaningful sample (5000+ hours) regardless of how deep. I know plenty of guys who bragged about making 30-40k in a single month at 2/5 with 200BB max buy, and sure enough when I watched them play they just ran pure no matter what they did. These were also followed with 10k losing sessions on occasion though (guess 3betting 82o from MP is not longterm profitable), hence all things balance in the end.

I definitely think that effective stack sizes will affect winrates by a lot. I said effective stack sizes because the structure of the game might be 300bb or no max, but most players in the player pool might try to buy in semi-shallow or shallow.

You can win much bigger pots when cooler situations go your way. If you are a crusher who understands theory and exploits in your player pool, you also have a lot of stack behind to put pressure with big bluffs on people in capped range spots that would just be give ups in a shallow structure.

Basically, winrate should go up by a lot in deep stacked structures.

As far as 5/10 1.5k cap versus 2/5 1.5k cap, winrates between the two structures depend on some different variables.

Does most of your winrate come from coolering fishes and not much from out playing regs in deep stack spots? Are the fishes buying in relatively shallow compared to the cap? Etc.

Hard to say what the different winrates will be between 2/5 1.5k cap and 5/10 1.5k cap unless you break down all the variables.

With all that said, there are a lot of ways to increase your winrate if you have a good work ethic (study hard) and/or good common sense.

I would say that many posters in this forum would be surprised at the winrates possible for the top crushers if they actually had honest conversations with those top crushers.

Basically, you can win a ton of money in live poker (way more than 90% of the live "pros" make) in a good player pool if you really want to put the effort to win the maximum.

The coach with whom you talked is definitely wrong about the top winrates possible.

10 bbs/100 hands dealt is only about $50 profit at 2/5 live per 3 hours. That's an hourly of $15-$20. Maybe he meant to say $50/hour being a myth at 2/5 300bb cap. Even if he meant that, I think he is seriously underestimating the top winrates possible.

I beg to disagree.

Maybe you have not met someone who is that good to win WAY MORE than $50/hour at deep stacked 2/5, but it doesn't mean that they don't exist. Top crushers (maybe 1% of "live pros") could and would destroy deep stacked live NLHE tables for enormous winrates.

With that said, top crushers typically get bored of 2/5 deep stack and move up to higher stakes games.

I had a heated debate with an online pro who argued that achieving 40bb/100 hands (~10bb/hour) is unrealistic. He claimed there was something fundamentally wrong with those numbers, suggesting that to reach such a rate, you would need to play at tables where all 8 opponents are giant whales. He insisted that it's simply not feasible.

He even doubted the possibility of making 5bb/hour, as that would mean achieving 20bb/100 hands, a figure he believes is unattainable even at the NL2 stakes.

Sounds like he has never played live poker.

I quit tracking for a long while when it lost purpose, but I started again in September as a prop bet. Got 600 hours before other commitments took over.

In 1/3 $500, I was just over 22bb/hr and this was mainly 2-8pm weekdays, about 3:1 weekday to weekend ratio. Needless to say, I am very good against regs, in fact, Thursday to Saturday are my worst with 10bb/hr.

Yes, and more than that is average session buy-in amount, or I guess in casino term, coin-in per session. If there are bunch of players that can afford to lose $1,000 per session, the game would have a pretty high ceiling for WR.

There aren’t too many areas that can sustain such player pool, hence the perception of WR ceiling in general is usually less than 10bb/hr.