6 Max Win Rate

[joecool73007]

Hello...

What's a good 6-Max win rate?  How would you classify an "Expert" vs "Very Good" vs "Above Average" vs "Lousy"?

I'm a low-volume player that's wondering how I stack up.  The last few weeks I've played 5k hands at 6-Max NL 25/50 with a rate (not counting rakeback/bonus) of 13 BB/100 hands.  Unsustainable?  Lucky?

[Deadmoney]

That is not sustainable and 5k is hands is peanuts.........usually a good rate is 5-7


Regards David

[MellowYellow]

yeah hate to break it to you but expect some brutal swings.

[joecool73007]

I know it's a tiny sample - like I said, right now I'm a low-volume player.  I understand there will be brutal swings, I've been stacked many times.  My worst swing over 1700 hands I lost 16 BB/100 hands; I made some adjustments and over my last 1900 hands I've made over 38 BB/100.  Just wondering what things may look like after 50k hands.

[Tony]

Just wondering what things may look like after 50k hands.

Hi Joe,

Unfortunately 50k hands is also not enough hands for your true win-rate to converge either.  In the past I've posted graphs of players who have broke even over one stretch of 100K hands, then won xbb/100 over the next 100K.  You really need hundreds of thousands of hands, by which time your game will probably have changed a lot anyway, particularly if you're a low volume player.

If you want to look at win-rates of players in your game, go and have a look at the PokerTableRatings website and plug their names in.  But remember that a lot of players don't play enough hands for these numbers to mean anything.  A win-rate above zero over a large sample is a good result, since you'll also make money from rakeback/bonuses.  When it was still 'legal' to datamine Full Tilt I posted results on a monthly basis, and most high volume players were making around 4-5 bb/100 over large samples.  The number of players making significantly more than this was much smaller.

You will hear people on all forums talking about huge win-rates, but this is because they're either lying, forgetting about losing hands they've deleted from their database, or quoting from a sample size that is too small.  In practical terms you should just play and try to make consistently good decisions, and let your win-rate worry about itself.

[Halcyon]

...you should just play and try to make consistently good decisions, and let your win-rate worry about itself.

AND have fun doing it

Michael

[joecool73007]

Thanks!  That's good stuff and what I hoped to learn.  The numbers are surprising to me - hundreds of thousands of hands - but I believe it.  While I'm a numbers guy I don't use any tracking software, I just keep my own spreadsheet, and I'll admit I have very poor notes on other players.  I prefer to play by feel and not by stats anyways, I like to think I know which guys I can abuse with medium-strength hands (they generally minraise pf), which guys I need monsters to beat, and which guys I can wait out to make a big mistake with most of their stack.  Hopefully my current 2300-hand hot streak will continue for a long time!

[MellowYellow]

yeah when people start saying u need hundreds of thousands of hands to figure out your winrate, I start to really think that because poker is an ever changing game with ever changing opponents, there IS no true winrate.. I mean your game changes, their game changes your opponents change etc..  Just win!