A good win rate

The question of what a good win rate in poker is has a different answer per stake. A win rate is your profit per 100 hands (bb/100), expressed in big blinds so that you can compare stakes fairly. The lower the stake, the weaker the opposition and the higher the achievable win rate, which quickly makes a bare comparison between players at different stakes misleading. The numbers below are guidelines from online practice, not laws, and hold for cash games with six players at the table. One warning first: the number only means something once there are enough hands behind it, and that is where it goes wrong for most players.

The guidelines per stake

At NL2 and NL5 the opposition is so weak that a solid player can manage 5 to 10 bb/100, and higher outliers do occur. At NL10 and NL25, 3 to 6 bb/100 is a strong score and you may call anything above zero an achievement once rake is counted. From NL50 upwards the field gets noticeably tougher and 1 to 4 bb/100 is the domain of the good players. One pattern runs through all of it: the higher you climb, the smaller the margins and the more important table selection becomes. Live poker is a story of its own: far fewer hands are played per hour there, but the opposition at comparable amounts is usually weaker, so win rates in bb/100 can be considerably higher than online.

Why your sample decides almost everything

A win rate over five thousand hands is not a measurement but a snapshot. The swings per 100 hands are many times larger than your margin, so chance can distort your figure for months, upwards and downwards. Doubt after a disappointing month therefore says just as little as euphoria after a great one: both measure the luck, not the player. Only count on a rough indication from several tens of thousands of hands onwards, and treat even a figure over a hundred thousand hands as an estimate with a margin. In practice this means an evening player needs months before their win rate measures more than their luck, and that your colleague claiming 30 bb/100 after five hundred hands has mainly had a good week. Why that is so you can read in variance in poker.

Rake: the quiet brake

Your win rate is always the number after rake, the part the poker room keeps from every pot. At the lowest stakes that percentage is relatively highest, so a large part of your theoretical edge stays with the room. That is no reason to skip NL2, but it is a reason to keep pots with marginal hands small and to take your profit from clear situations rather than borderline ones. If you compare yourself with other people's win rates, always check whether those were measured before or after rake, otherwise you are comparing apples with half eaten pears.

How to improve the number

You do not improve a win rate by staring at the number but by improving the decisions behind it: entering tighter, betting thicker with real hands and letting go earlier when you are beaten, the heart of the cash strategy for low stakes. Every leak you close feeds straight into your profit per 100 hands, even though you only see it in the graph months later. Choose your tables deliberately as well: one clearly weak player at the table does more for your profit per 100 hands than any technical refinement, and nothing obliges you to stay at a table full of solid players when a softer one is available. Use the number for what it is meant for, as a thermometer over long periods, and steer day to day on the quality of your play. A player who decides a little better every week never has to worry about their profit per 100 hands: that figure trundles along behind, with a delay.