Thank you for sharing this Cannabusto! Very cool to know. As a semi -serious rec it’s also interesting to read stuff like this

I lost my BR and would prefer not to get a job to get a starting roll. I played a 8 hour session at my local B&R and played 4/8 limit holdem. The game was so easy to beat. Even the tight regs were afraid of any scare cards and refused to get thin value because they have no idea how to hand read. Of course, the rake was ridiculous and would be the only issue. The house takes 10% up to $5 plus $2 for promos. Does anyone have enough hours to show a reliable winrate with these conditions?

Isn't a great winrate for LHE considered like 1BB/hr?

Honestly, if I could make anywhere near close to $16/hr in a job, I'd probably try to avoid low stakes LHE, it just sounds soul crushing.

as far as im aware, 2bb/hr is considered crushing for limit games.

However, that was what I gathered from 20/40 and 40/80, where the rake is significantly smaller.

At $7/hand, fairly certain this game is unbeatable.

Before we go down this road again: 1BB=2bb.

YGO and I are saying the same thing

Are we saying 2bb/hr before the rake or after?

Also, the room offers fairly good promos which favor a solid limit player as well. HH promos alone would yield about $3 an hour average over time additional plus the standard $1 paid by the room. If this is the case, it would appear as if this game would be more (or similar) profitable than many 1/2 games with 100bb max buyins. Would anyone agree?

I apologize. I thought your SD was in BBs, not Euro. At BBs, it's a tidge on the smaller side, but within a normal range for winning regs.

Ah ok thank you

Solid results.

You're wise to realize that job>>poker at this age. I know very few people who have been able to manage that lifestyle very well, and none of the pros I know personally have a family. I'm not saying it can't be done, but there's a huge opportunity cost involved, and life variance is a huge b*tch. I made a serious run at semi-pro a few years back and got so burned out that I decided to step away from poker and not return until I actually felt like playing again. I was gone for two years.

I also believe that anyone with the intelligence, adaptability, patience, work ethic, and discipline to be a winning poker player will quickly rise to the upper echelons of any chosen profession.

I'm EXTREMELY happy having a solid job that I love which pays more than enough to cover my nut. Poker is now just a hobby/side hustle that pays for vacations and all the new toys/tools I want for my woodshop. I honestly think job+poker is the most +EV option.

Thanks but I'm not some fresh faced 22 yo kid I'm unfortunately 28 LOL. I did work in the bank for eight months though. Hated it and quit to try to be a online pro. But got lazy, depressed and didn't put in enough hours to make enough to move out or get good enough to progress to midstakes where a career as an online would be at least somewhat justified. So I went back to school in 2016 and here I am. I'm actually in Las Vegas right now looking for a programming job but as a Canadian it looks like unless I can network and meet the right people in person (which I don't know how I would do just from playing poker and hanging out with friends), I'm simply not gonna get in here.

But yeah, poker full time sucks. At least for me. Your hourly is probably 3x during the weekend compared to during the week anyways. Yes it would take a STUPIDLY large sample to prove that your Saturday hourly is in fact way more than your Tuesday hourly but maybe collectively we can? I would have to do some excel magic to figure out which day of the week my sessions are on.

Everyone talks about weekend weekend weekend but just about everywhere except Vegas my experience has been that weekday games are actually better and all the weekend warrior nit grinders infest the games all weekend.

Good point. I don't have nearly enough hours in this year to tell but as LRR points out maybe if we collectively look we can see a trend. Where I play I feel like the games are more splashy on the weekend which should mean higher variance but I'm not sure how that effects win rate. Here's my data for 2018 filtered by day of week:
Day - Session Count - Hours - $/Hr
Mon - 9 - 27 - $67.53
Tue - 6 - 12 - $28.61
Wed - 1 - 7 - $36.30
Thu - 8 - 17 - $49.39
Fri - 11 - 32 - (-$15.52)
Sat - 49 - 137 - $102
Sun - 7 - 22 - $33.18

Good job to everyone crushing it this year, thanks for posting guys! Also big props for Dizzy for posting his results.

My results are rather lame relative to lots of others but I'm super happy with this year (especially since rake was increased for the third straight year). 7.12 bb/hr at my 1/3 NL game over 526:30 hours, squeaking out my best hourly since 2013 (while also winning just ~slightly more than my overall hourly). Fell a little short of my normal average hours although somehow got in my second most sessions.



Fairly happy with my newish Super Nit method (smaller BI, much more tighter / passive overall, my SD this year was a lol 46.5 bb/hr), although it could easily be run goodish over lol sample size. I'll be posting some more giraffes in 37 hours when I hit 1000 hours of Super Nit.

Also funny how poker gods are mainly at the controls. So I'm playing my last session of the year on New Years Eve and I've only got 2 hours left in my session before I have to leave for a party. I'm stuck a few hundred dollars and I'm doing the hour-by-hour math on my hourly and realize I'm now below my best hourly since 2013. But then the biggest maniac in the room sits down. Here we go. He blows thru two BIs in his first 2 hands but then builds up a monster stack. I finally get AA. And he... open folds preflop. Literally the first hand he's folded in an hour at the table (raising 50% of them), obviously balancing his range no doubt, but I sigh take down $10 preflop. Anyhoo, onwards. We play another hour and I can't get into a single pot, and now the floor comes over with racks for his massive stack and says his table change has come in. Ug. So he plays two more hands as he's stacking his mountain of chips and in both hands... I get dealt AA. I double up thru him on my first hand, and then take down $100 preflop on the next. And that's it, he goes over to his other table, and I book an ok session profit and ship my best year since 2013.

GmostlyjustatthemercyofthegodsG

I eeked out $7.09/hr over 466 hours of live 4/8 limit about a decade ago, but my game was a kill game (every tenth hand is a 8/16 game which helps outrun rake), plus the rake was only $3 maximum with only a $1 BBJ drop.

Highly doubt a non-kill 4/8 limit game with $5 rake / $2 drop is beatable, or at the very least for anything remotely comparable to what you could beat 1/2 NL for.

GimoG

I play in small player pool. Almost zero good players during week. But the solid Tags come and fill seats on weekends. I much prefer playing bankers hours too.

+1. M/T/W are three of my best days. For some reason I take a hit on Thursdays (burnout?), and Fridays and Saturdays are much less impressive.

Here's my latest 1/3 NL day-by-day results. In my opinion the differences are all just lol sample noise as I don't believe my games play any different at any time (although admittedly I'm ~never at the table after 9:30pm). I don't think it's any coincidence that the winrates starts converging to my overall winrate of ~$21 the more the hours increase.

Day / winrate / hours

Monday $16.37 420
Tuesday $23.76 411
Wednesday $13.42 277
Thursday $28.34 429
Friday $18.81 439
Saturday $20.94 878
Sunday $21.28 1417

GcluelessdayoftheweeknoobG

Actually at my normal rooms, time of day may be more statistically significant than day of the week IMO. Even on the weekends I find that most of the fish have been caught by 1 or 2 AM and the games get noticeably tougher as the number of tables decrease in general. That's not to say you cant find a drunk guy who's running good late, It's just less likely they'll still have chips the later it gets. Neither of my tracking apps have filters for time of day. Heavy tourist areas like Vegas may not see as much turnover in player type weekdays to weekends and afternoon vs evenings. Just thinking out loud.

When I enter my session, I enter them in 4 categories. If I was playing Bellagio, I would enter it as 4 different rooms depending on the day and time of day.
Bellagio 1 for weekday daytime
Bellagio 2 for weekday evening (session starts at 6PM or later)
Bellagio 3 for weekend daytime
Bellagio 4 for weekend evening

That way I can easily sort for what I call "peak" times or "non peak" times. Peak times are 2, 3 and 4.

My win rate is 26% higher at peak times than non peak times over a pretty large sample and Ive never played past midnight a single time during that sample. My guess is that games after midnight are even better.

As far as days of the week, it seems to be more random and room dependent. My best day is Sunday by a significant margin. My worst day is Saturday but its not that far behind the other days which are pretty close to each other.

Good idea. I wish I had done this from the start. Back, editing hundreds of entries after the fact has a very low probability of getting done. I may start using this for 2019 though as I haven't played yet this year. Thanks.

How do you handle sessions which span categories, especially going across 6:00pm (which for me would be ~99% of my sessions)?

GcluelessstatstrackingnoobG

At my room the 12-6pm 2/5/10 often only has 2 or 3 pros/decent regs whereas the evening and weekend games often have 7

That almost never happens for me. Most of my sessions start between 10am-noon and end between 4pm-6pm.

When I play in the evening its almost always on a day where I had other stuff to do during the day and started a session after dinner.

The few times that Ive had a session that started during the day and went past 6pm, if I planned to play more than 1 hour past 6pm, I just ended the session and started a new one at 6PM.

Mike are you a pro?

I find the day games at my home casino to be much better during the day than at night. I usually never play past 8 unless I’m in Vegas

Ty, Happy 2019!

I track VPIP/PFR manually. Pretty easy.