What's a Good Win Rate in Live Poker? (bb/hr, Honestly)

By Rohit Kaul · August 5, 2026 · 9 min read

Ask what a good win rate is at $1/$2 and the published answers span a factor of ten. The old live rule of thumb says one big blind an hour — about $2. BlackRain79 puts the very best players at 10bb an hour, or $20 (BlackRain79). Red Chip Poker's estimate for a full-time $1/$2 pro tops out around $25 — and falls as volume rises (Red Chip Poker). Same stake, same question, answers an order of magnitude apart.

That spread isn't carelessness. It's what happens when a number gets quoted without its units, its rake assumptions, or its sample size. This post lines the benchmarks up, does the conversion arithmetic the sources skip, and then asks the question none of them answer: how many hours before your number means anything?

What the published benchmarks actually say

The most-cited figures come from BlackRain79, who is at least explicit about both his units and his uncertainty. His ladder starts at $20 an hour for the very best at $1/$2 and climbs to $170 at $10/$20 — numbers he himself calls "wild speculations" (BlackRain79). Red Chip's Kat Martin, writing about playing $1/$2 for a living, lands lower: a realistic ceiling near $25 an hour for a full-time pro, with the rate declining as volume grows (Red Chip Poker). And in the comments under BlackRain79's own hourly-rate article, the old-school counterpoint survives: the traditional live rule of thumb of one big blind per hour, with the $20 figure dismissed as unattainable over big samples.

Why live win rates come in bb per hour, not bb/100

Online, win rate means big blinds per 100 hands — bb/100. Live, nobody quotes that, because nobody deals 100 hands quickly enough for it to feel natural. A full-ring live table gets through roughly 25 to 30 hands an hour (Upswing Poker). So the live convention is big blinds per hour, and the dollars-per-hour phrasing most players actually use is the same number times the big blind (PokerCoaching.com).

The conversion is one division, and it's worth doing once because the result is startling. Ten big blinds an hour at 25–30 hands an hour is roughly 33–40 bb/100. For comparison, BlackRain79's own range for good online small-stakes win rates runs 3–30 bb/100, with the low single digits counting as solid at most stakes (BlackRain79). Taken at face value, the standard live benchmark claims live pros beat their games at around ten times the rate strong online players beat theirs.

How much of your win rate does the rake eat?

More than any benchmark admits, and it lands hardest at the lowest stakes. A typical low-stakes live game takes a tenth of each pot capped at $5 or $6, plus promo drops on top (PokerNews). Ashley Adams runs the numbers for a full $1/$2 table: between rake, jackpot drops, and dealer tips, roughly $180 an hour leaves the table — the rake alone costing each player about $12 an hour before winners and losers are sorted at all.

Set that against the benchmarks above and the disagreement starts to explain itself. Twelve dollars an hour is more than half of BlackRain79's entire "very best" win rate at $1/$2 — a player who'd beat the game for $32 an hour rake-free is a $20 winner, and a modest rake-free winner is an outright loser.

Jonathan Little makes the structural point crisply: a $5 cap at $1/$2 is two and a half big blinds out of every capped pot, while the cap at nosebleed stakes is a rounding error (PokerCoaching.com). The rake burden runs backwards — heaviest exactly where the games are softest. When two coaches disagree about what's achievable at $1/$2, check whether they're imagining the same drop structure before assuming one of them is wrong.

How many hours before your win rate means anything?

Here's the part every benchmark skips. Primedope's variance calculator — the upstream source most published poker variance work leans on — answers it in its FAQ: roughly 100,000 hands for a ±1.8 BB/100 read at 95% confidence (Primedope). We ran the standard formula on the same inputs, and the honest correction points up, not down. At a standard deviation of 90 BB/100, 100,000 hands only narrows you to about ±5.6 BB/100; the ±1.8 read takes closer to a million hands — that check is our arithmetic. Either way the conclusion holds: at 25–30 live hands an hour, even the friendlier figure is 3,300 to 4,000 hours of play, and the million-hand version is a whole career.

Shorter samples aren't worthless; they're just wide. A few hundred hours of live results is consistent with being a solid winner, a breakeven player, or a modest loser all at once. It's the same sample-size wall we hit running the tournament version of this question through our variance engine — even 1,000 tournaments couldn't separate a good player from a losing one. If you want to see your own band rather than take ours on faith, our variance calculator will compute it from your win rate, standard deviation, and hours — or prefill those numbers from your own tracked sessions.

What does a real tracked sample look like?

Rohit — who builds TableLab — published his own numbers at Cardplayer Lifestyle in July: 2,735 hours of tracked live cash — the cash-game core of the roughly 3,200 tracked hours in the article's title — at about $83 CAD an hour (Cardplayer Lifestyle). Even that sample, more live hours than most regulars log in four years, only pins the true rate inside roughly a ±$25 band — his own caveat in the piece. The band is wider than the entire BlackRain79-versus-rule-of-thumb dispute at $1/$2.

The tracked data also shows things a single headline number hides. He won more than two-thirds of his sessions, yet the median losing session outweighed the median winning one — win percentage flattered the graph while the tail carried it, with the top tenth of sessions producing nearly two-thirds of total profit. And the hourly rate fell off a cliff with session length:

None of that is visible in "I make about $80 an hour." It only falls out of logged sessions with start times, end times, and stakes attached — which is the practical argument for tracking in the first place.

So what number should you aim for?

Not a number — a procedure. The benchmarks disagree too much, and your rake structure, pool, and hours differ too much from anyone else's for a borrowed target to mean anything. What works instead:

• Measure post-rake, in both units. Log every session with stakes and hours; let the tracker compute $/hr and bb/hr from the same data. Dollars pay rent; big blinds tell you whether you beat the game or just moved up.
• Attach the hours to the number. "$40/hr over 180 hours" and "$40/hr over 2,000 hours" are different claims. Quote your win rate the way you'd want a benchmark quoted to you.
• Judge the inputs you control. Session length, game selection, and rake structure moved the tracked numbers above more than any strategy tweak. Your bankroll should follow field and rake reality too — our buy-in guide covers that side.

The bottom line

• Published "good win rate" figures at $1/$2 span $2 to $25 an hour, and none of them publish the sample behind the claim.
• Live win rates are quoted in bb per hour; at 25–30 hands an hour, the standard 10bb/hr benchmark converts to roughly 33–40 bb/100 — ten times a strong online rate. Treat that gap with suspicion, not pride.
• Rake alone takes roughly $12 an hour from every $1/$2 player before anyone wins a cent — 60% of BlackRain79's "very best" figure. Pre-rake and post-rake claims aren't comparable.
• Trusting a live win rate to within a couple of bb/100 takes 100,000 hands by the friendliest published figure — 3,300+ live hours — and closer to a million hands by our own check of the math. Anything shorter is an estimate, and should be quoted with its hours.
• A real 2,735-hour tracked sample still carries a ±$25/hr band — wider than the entire published disagreement it would settle.

The honest answer to "what's a good live poker win rate" is: measured over what sample, after what rake? Anyone who answers without asking those two questions first is quoting folklore. Start logging your sessions and let your own graph do the arguing — and when the number swings wildly month to month, that's variance doing what variance does, not necessarily you.

Sources

• Williams, N. (BlackRain79), "Good Poker Win Rates for Micro and Small Stakes," 2014, blackrain79.com
• Williams, N. (BlackRain79), "What is a Good Poker Hourly Rate?," 2018, blackrain79.com
• Martin, K., "Playing $1/$2 Poker for a Living," Red Chip Poker, 2017-09-22, redchippoker.com
• Fisk, G., "How Many Poker Hands Are Played Per Hour? (Live Poker vs Online)," Upswing Poker, 2020-02-05, upswingpoker.com
• Adams, A., "Let's Look at the Rake (and Time Charges)," PokerNews, 2017-08-07, pokernews.com
• Little, J., "How to Beat the Rake in Poker," PokerCoaching.com, 2024-09-19, pokercoaching.com
• PokerCoaching.com, "Win Rate — Poker Terms," pokercoaching.com
• Primedope, "Poker Variance Calculator (Cash Games)," updated 2026-02-28, primedope.com
• Kaul, R., "What 3,200 Hours of Tracked Live Poker Taught Me About My Own Game," Cardplayer Lifestyle, 2026-07-29, cardplayerlifestyle.com

Win rates here are published estimates and one tracked personal sample, not universal truths — your rake structure, pool, and hours will move every number. The bb/100 conversions and hour equivalents are our arithmetic on the cited inputs, flagged where they appear. Poker involves real variance and real risk; nothing here is financial advice. Verify big bankroll decisions against your own tracked results.