What is the criteria for judging so? Is it ROI? Last year I had a ROI of 69.24%, of which I did not play my best for a good portion of the sessions. Is that good and what's a good ROI?

No easy answers, except to say that

• Proving it numerically probably takes a much larger sample than you think - esp. if you play multi-table tourneys
• Even when you can't prove it numerically, you "just know" that you're not making the same mistakes as your opponents.
• You don't have to be that good to take it seriously -- just invest the time and money in learning and getting better, and the results will take care of themselves.

Some of Ed Miller's writings are helpful, especially this one: How Do I Know When I'm Awesome?

I think it's intuitive for the most part and you can judge wheter or not you're a winning player just by "knowing"

if ur asking ur prolly not a winning player but that roi is good how many tourneys is that over?

I don't accept the way you worded the question.

You don't get good and then get serious. You get serious in order to become good.

Unless you have great natural talent and the right skill set (intelligence, mathematical aptitude, good memory, etc.) you aren't going to just become good enough to take poker seriously.

You have to take poker seriously at the beginning. Read and then study poker books while you're playing freerolls. Go over a few hand histories from your $1 MTT and see if you're making good decisions. If you don't know if you're making good decisions, post a hand on these forums and ask.

Memorize pot odds and outs up to 20 outs. Memorize all the most likely hands and number of outs, until you see a gutshot/flush draw/one overcard, and know how many outs that is without having to think about it.

Learn how and when to change gears. Understand that everything is situational--you might not play KQs early in an MTT the same way you would early in a 1TT.

Spend some time on here in "Beginners Questions". Also, even if you don't understand most of it, look at a few of the "Poker Theory" posts every once in a while. It will help you to know what the good players think about, and keep you humble as far as thinking you have it all figured out.

To sum it all up--Do the work. Like a musician practicing his scales several hours a day (Yo Yo Ma really does do that, by the way), you get good by working at it.

While the musician is learning a D Mixolidian scale, you are learning odds and outs.

There is no magic bullet. Do the work, and chances are, you'll be a good player--in time. There aren't any shortcuts.

I got nothing out of that article. He says you know you're awesome when you get better. WTF, the whole question is how do you know when you're getting better?

0 tournaments. I'm a cash game player. Is that still a good ROI?

I'm assuming anything pass 50 is good since it's passing right?

Thanks everyone for your input.

ROI doesn't usually apply to cash games. Cash game prowess is usually measured in big bets or big blinds per unit of time or per 100 hands.

Lucky

Ah okay thanks. So I assume anything 50 and above is a good BB per 100 hands since it's passing? If you could provide me with a guideline or point me to a source that defines this that would be great.

Thanks again!

50 big bets per 100 hands would be ridiculous and unsustainable over any decent sample size. Ditto for 50 big blinds per 100 hands.

A good win rate in tough NL games is 10 big blinds per 100. For tough limit a good win rate is 2-3 big bets per 100 (this is more of a guess since I don't really play limit).

Lucky

Newb question, BB per Hour. Is that big blinds per hour? For example at a .02/.04 table would .04 be 1BB per Hour? Or would the max buy-in for the table be the BB per hour?

Thanks
MonkeySucker

I have to strongly disagree here... Humans are notoriously bad at judging ourselves. We are experts at fooling ourselves. I have actually asked around the cardroom I play at, and literally 90% of the people I ask tell me that they are a winning player. I think that at least 80% of them really believe it.

Everyone wants to believe that he is a winning player, and the power of "wanting to believe" is amazing.

BB stands for "big bet". In limit hold 'em, 1 big bet is 2x the big blind. e.g. In a $5/10 LHE game, generally, the small blind is $2 (or $3), the big blind is $5, and a "big bet" or BB is $10.

From what I understand, this has just carried over into no-limit hold 'em so that 1 BB = 2x big blind...

example of bb/100
say you are playing nl200 with a big blind of $2 if you make on average $8 per 100 hands then you would have a win rate of 4bb/100. you need to play about 30,000 hands to get an idea of what your winrate is at a specific limit. if you are playing limit its BB/100 a BB is 2x the big blind or bb

For a tough game this win rate would be superb. Anything over 1 is pretty darn good for a tough game. In lower limits with weaker opponents, 2 to 3 BB/100 is achievable with reasonable skill, but obviously the size of the rake starts to have a huge impact.

No, it's just an archaic Poker Tracker kludge that's no longer necessary. Poker Tracker can display in big blinds, now, so using "Poker Tracker big bets" is ridiculous and only to talk to people who are too set in their ways to adjust.

It's been a long time since I've discussed winrates with people in any NL forum but they may well be too set in their ways to adjust. Don't follow their example.

Care to explain winrates then?

All of the below refers to ring games. Since your OP refers to ROI, which is usually a measure of tournament performance, I have no idea if the following discussion is useful to you or not.

Many people cite winrates using derivations of an archaic unit, the "Poker Tracker big bet", which has as much relevance to no-limit poker as the furlong or the league has to 21st-century life. It's nice to know that it's 2 big blinds (BBL) for conversion, but their adherence to such a unit is silly.

I quote NLHE winrates in BBL / hour (live) or BBL / 100 hands (online). Since every NLHE ring game has a fixed "big blind" (though occasionally, the structure may be $5-5 or something) it's a very natural unit to describe the game.

It's pretty simple: Take the gross amount of win (or loss) in a game, say, $500. Divide by the big blind, say, 50c. That's 1000 BBL and is your numerator.

Take the total number of hands, say 25987. Divide by 100. That's 259.87, your number of hundreds of hands played, and is your denominator.

Divide the numerator by the denominator: 1000 BBL / 25.47 hundreds of hands => 3.84 BBL / hundred hands.

When discussing this, make it clear that that's in big blinds so that the dinosaurs don't think you're using PTBB. If the dinosaur insists, divide your number by two to get PTBB/100 - 1.92 in this case.

NLHE never has a fixed big bet size -- by definition, duh, that's why it's called no-limit! -- so calling it a big bet is ludicrous. Actually a $10 postflop bet in a $2-5 game would usually be an extremely small bet.

Different strokes for different folks. I found the following to be pure gold and correspond to my experience. Your mileage may vary.

(Emphasis added)

It sounds to me like the biggest cause of frustration with the article is its refusal to provide an ironclad standard. "If you average 4 BBL/100 over 10k hands of online $1-2 NLHE, you are a poker genius!" To my experience, Ed's right. It's not like that. You can play well for a very long time and end up loser, or you can catch cards and get lucky.

I look for whether I see my opponents making mistakes that I wouldn't make. This is hard, because I rarely get to see their hole cards (especially in NLHE), but it's important. If I see them making mistakes I wouldn't make, then it's plausible that I could beat that game.

AFAIK Ed doesn't claim to know the sum total of everyone's experience, and I certainly don't, so perhaps this isn't useful to you. Hopefully someone will read it, identify with it, and be glad I linked it.

Very interesting! So having said all that, at the end of all the math, is 3.84 BBL/hundred hands good? What would you consider to be bad, average, good, and excellent?

Thanks for your insight. I appreciate it.

Ed's piece has a lot of ways you SHOULDN'T use to determine if you're a winning player, but that's not the question.

Counting mistakes is pretty iffy. You could be making mistakes you didn't think were mistakes, otherwise you wouldn't be making them. Also, the biggest decision are the ones that win or lose you a pot, and much of the time, you can't classify as a mistake or not. Suppose you call or fold to a bluff. Is that a mistake or not? How can you tell?