pretty much this. reason being the smaller easier to hit ones if you play enough will be around your ev of hitting them, the huge ones obviously won't be.

Everyone who is saying to ignore random high hands because they are all "luck" needs to remember a lot of the large poker pots are also "luck". Set over set of aces vs kings, that number is going to show up in your "win rate" but is not the best indication of skill - just need to hope it evens out over the long run.

For rewards under ~$500 that you can realistically except to hit once a month or so, I would track them in a separate column just so you have the data, but it's not unreasonable to include it in your "win rate". The money to fun the prize is coming out of the pots, it should be fine to include as long as the layout frequency is high enough to reach some sort of reasonable normalizAtion.

It is the once in the lifetime 50k payouts that will mess up your stats. You will not play long enough to reach the reasonable "long term" in this scenario.

I still point out that the difference between these issues is that one is a promotional payout and the other is tied to chips you put into a pot actually playing the game. Granted you aren't eligible for the promotional payout unless you put chips into a pot, but it's still not part of the game.

This is a great thread with no right answer. The IRS doesn't care how you won it, just pay your fair share along the way!! GL

Where i live some rooms have
- a buy-in bonus (e.g. you buy in for 500 and get 550 in chips)
- rakeback (e.g. 5 per hour)

I chose to include those in my winrate (this way i can compare my hourly rate between different rooms that have different promotions, since i can filter my data by room).

btw, i also pay for food and drink with chips from the table, because i want these "costs" included in my winrate.

i think i would draw the line at about 3 buy-ins for my usual game, if its more than that i probably wouldnt include it in my winrate, so its closer to my expected short term win rate.

I suggest 50/50 in the way you track the typical high hand type jackpot. This is because there is at least some skill involved in winning it - hand selection, how you play the board, knowing when to continue to build the pot and when to check it down...

Take the latter - building the pot and risking losing the high hand (most places, though not all, require a showdown) versus checking it down but losing to another high hand during the reward period.

I won my first high hand jackpot yesterday - quad Js with a 9. Flopped set on a flush draw board, got my value bet called, and the 4th J came OTT. There were 12 minutes left in the promotional period and about 18 or 19 tables running at the time. I decided to check the hand down because (a) I didn't think anyone would call without a FH and (b) I figured the chances of the quads holding up were pretty good. If there were 30 tables and an hour+ remaining in the period I may have played the hand more aggressively. As it was I was nervous until the clock reset and I heard the congratulations over the PA...

So, I won the jackpot partly due to luck but partly due to smart (I think) play. Since I am using my win-rate as a way of evaluating whether I am playing in a skillful way (once I get a decent sample size, of course) I think that at least some of yesterda's jackpot should count towards it, but not all.

BTW, other jackpots - Aces cracked, or a jackpot that does not require a showdown (Trop in AC has a few of those) could be the result of bad play in the former or are really about almost pure luck in the latter. Again, given why I am tracking my win-rate I would not count them.

BTW, there is one bad beat jackpot that I would consider including in one's win-rate in a particular situation.

Harrah's and Bally's in AC pay a room share each time the BBJ hits. I think it hits, on average, once every six weeks or so. Based on conversations I have had with regs in the rooms the room share can easily be anywhere from 500 to 900 per player when it hits. If I were a reg in those rooms playing the equivalent of at least part time (20+ hours a week) then I might be comfortable including the BBJ payouts in my win-rate.

In which column do rewards dollars go?

Ok ... I'm bending a little bit, but not ready to break. In the example above it seems OP needs a showdown to win a HH (not sure why) so he potentially loses value in the hand in order to gain the HH value.

So I'm going to throw a golf term out here now. Each course (actually each tee level) has a independent rating given to it. This rating is so that players can compare this course to their home course. If your home tee has a rating of 72.0 (par 72) and the course you are going to has a rating of 74.1 (par 72), then you are expected to shoot 2.1 strokes higher here than at your home course. If we wanted to include the potential for HH/BBJ winnings into a win rate then I think it would need to be handicapped similar to what golf does.

Except for poker it probably would be the opposite, being the tougher the room the lower the 'expected' win rate for that room when compared to the 'average' room.

If a player is really changing how he uses his chips in order to make a gain (or make a larger than expected gain), then perhaps he needs to incorporate those earnings in his win rate ... but only for that room. And I would encourage that player to establish win rates by the room and not just dumping all the data into one pool. GL

Rewards, as in HH? Then #1.
Rewards, as in casino "reward points"? Then #1 as well.

I play in a small Indian casino which rarely has more than one table of 3/6 HE going. Very loose, very passive...so I'm going to play all pockets. No skill in flopping quads. Skill comes in making sure there is $20 in the pot to qualify. Hand doesn't even need to get to showdown.

I don't consider the HH jackpot "earned" money.

Ew, don't call them "pockets".

In the rooms I play in MD (Live and Horseshoe) you only qualify for the high hand jackpot if the hand goes all the way to showdown.

I think this is an excellent approach and response to what I wrote above. I already track each room individually since the room is one of the data points in the app I use (Poker Manager Pro).

That is such a horrible rule.

Obv for a BBJ you need a showdown, but for HH that really stinks. I've never seen it this way, but I don't get around too much.

The one room that has this all the time has most people shoving the Flop so they don't lose their kicker if the board shows JJJ and they hold J9. GL

In my case I don't change my play in anticipation of hitting the HH/BBJ OTF, T, or R. The only time when I might modify my play is if I have the current HH and think it will hold up for the duration of the promo period.

Players chasing HH/BBJ are exploitable, which makes me $$.

There's something that the whole 'counting high hand pay outs as part of your winrate isn't an accurate indicator of your skill level,' crowd is glossing over here.

Let's say I play in one room all the time, and you play in another room all the time. We both have 10,000 hours logged in our respective rooms. Neither of us has ever played a single hand in any other poker room, not ever.

My poker room takes $x rake yours takes $x+$1 the extra $1 being for the promotional drop.

Let's say we have exactly equal knowledge of the game, and skill level. Let's go a step further, and say in those 10,000 hands we have been dealt hand for hand the same hand and we have played them hand for hand exactly the same way as each other, played every street the same way, had the exact same bet sizing, and our opponents all played exactly the same on every street as well.

Ok, so we've done everything exactly the same over 10k hands and every situation was exactly the same. A perfect duplicate.

So before rake we have the exact same winrate down to the last dollar. BUT...

After rake we have a very different winrate, because for every pot we ever dragged over that 10k hands you had an extra dollar taken from the pot than I did.

So we are the exact same player skill wise, we have made the exact same decisions, except you have made less money than I have over our duplicate 10k hands because, and only because, you played in a room with a drop and I didn't.


So now my winrate is higher than yours and yours lower than mine even though there is no differential in skill and we have played all the same hands in all the same ways.

That's not an accurate indicator of your relative skill either.

Differences in rake absolutely should be considered when using winrate to determine skill level.

Counting promotional wins is one way to consider it, another would be to count rake won before rake.

But by the argument of most of the posters in this thread they would look at a large sample of a player who had played in a room with no promotional drop and a large sample of an equally skilled player who had played in a room with a promotional drop and conclude, incorrectly, that the former player is a better player than the latter player. In fact that would not be the case.

So you guys who say 'not an indicator of skill,' need to think about how you would account for rake differentials when trying to determine skill and ability from winrate.

There are a lot of good points here.

I wonder, though, whether this is more a theoretical issue than a practical one:

Let's say both players are semi-pros and play cash games 30 hours a week for 48 weeks a year. At an average of 30 hands per hour of play that is about 43k hands per year.

Let's also say these are relatively tight players each with a VPIP of 18%. So, each is only playing about 7,500 hands per year (added 500 for BB in a limped pot). Since this is live poker the overwhelming majority of those hands will see a flop and get raked; according to Steve Selbrede 86% of vegas hands see the flop, so that is 6,450 out of 7,500.

Let's say that both players are strong but not crushing 2/5, 8bb ($40) an hour or $57.6k a year (not bad for a 30 hour work week!). Let's also say (this is random) that each player takes down 30% of the pots on which they see a flop, or a total of 1935 wins.

In this hypothetical, the player giving $1 less to the house/jackpot will take home about $59.6k to the other player's $57.6k. A difference, sure, but not one that makes one player look drastically stronger than the other. With 43k hands a year it could even take 2 or 3 years before the difference would become evident due to variance.

(we have gone way beyond the OP's original question at this point, but it's fun)

So he wins 1.34 hands with a flop per hour [1935/(30*48)] out of 30 dealt.

That looks a bit high... I am pretty confident on the number of hands that see the flop. The number of pots won was totally random.

I don't know if this is a policy change or something because I have won several high hands in both rooms and this has never been the case.

Holy *** I feel like an idiot - I was both misreading the rules and misunderstanding what was being said at the tables.

My only defense is that I have only been playing for a few months... Still, ****!

Apologies to everyone in the thread for my idiocy!

No worries.

SO you know, it works like this:

Pocket pairs that make quads are always good

Quads with trips on the board, your kicker must play. IF you have A2 and the board is 222, you're good all the way. If the board is AAA with your A2, you better shove the flop because if the turn or river brings a 3 or higher your 2 is dead and your high hand is dead.

Straight flushes must use both hole cards and cannot be counterfeited so 56 with 789 ont he flop is fine, but 10 on the turn kills your high hand.

Thanks!

Even though it was for the wrong reasons, getting to the river with my quads made sense since the river could have brought a higher kicker.

Nope, that would have been bad...

Grunch: it depends if you are looking to stroke your own ego or miss lead others or if you are more intereasted in what you actually make.

Edit: (I only read BBJ) high hands should be included because they are frequent enough to even out over a large sample. Including BBJ's (even more so if it's more than just a table share) will tell you nothing about your true win rate.

I disagree; I contend that it will be flawed if you don't add it in. Here in South Florida, all of the rooms rake $5 + $2, with most of the $2 being returned in the form of high hand promos. (As an example, I was playing at Hialeah yesterday and between noon-10pm they were doing $500 high hand promos every 20 minutes.)

If I play just 20 hours a week and win on average 3 hands an hour, that's an extra $6,000 I've paid in the course of just one year over someone with the exact same skill level and results who plays in a room somewhere else in the country that doesn't have a jackpot drop. If I've managed to win just one high hand a month and "win" back the $6,000 that I've paid in, it would be illogical not to include it in my win rate. All it's done is make me whole and put me back on an even level with players in other parts of the country who play in rooms without bonuses.

And I would submit that if you play regularly in rooms that provide high hands as often as they do here in SoFla (every 15min-30min is common), then you should expect to even out long-term. It doesn't make sense to me to subtract out all of the thousands of dollars one pays throughout the year two dollars at a time, but not add it back in just because it's returned to you in chunks of $250 or $500 at a time. If you don't add back in any of the high hand money that you've won, then you are understating your win rate by $6/hr. (if you win on average 3 hands/hr.)