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What Is a Good Win Rate in Poker? bb/100 Explained
bb/100 measures how many big blinds you win per 100 hands. What counts as a good win rate at each stake, how to calculate yours and how many hands you need.
By PokerLevelUp Team · · 2 min read
bb/100 means big blinds won per 100 hands. It’s the standard way to measure a cash-game win rate, because it works at any stake: 5bb/100 means the same thing at $0.05/$0.10 as it does at $1/$2.
How to calculate it
bb/100 = (total won ÷ big blind) ÷ hands × 100
Example: at $0.05/$0.10 (NL10) you’ve won $150 over 20,000 hands.
- $150 ÷ $0.10 = 1,500 big blinds
- 1,500 ÷ 20,000 × 100 = 7.5bb/100
Tracking software (Hand2Note, HM3, PokerTracker) shows it automatically. For live poker, where hands are hard to count, players use big blinds per hour instead — our bankroll tracker logs your hourly rate.
What’s a good win rate?
Rough guide for online 6-max no-limit Hold’em, after rake:
| Win rate | What it means |
|---|---|
| Below 0 | Losing player — rake or leaks are beating you |
| 0–2bb/100 | Break-even to small winner |
| 2–5bb/100 | Solid winner |
| 5–10bb/100 | Strong winner, especially at micro stakes |
| 10bb/100+ | Excellent — usually only possible at the lowest stakes, or over a short sample |
Win rates fall as stakes rise because opponents get better. A 3bb/100 winner at NL200 is a far stronger player than a 10bb/100 winner at NL2. Full-ring win rates tend to be a little lower than 6-max; live win rates in bb/hour are usually higher because opponents make bigger mistakes.
Is your win rate real?
Probably less real than you think. Poker results swing a lot, and your measured win rate only settles down over a very large sample. With a typical standard deviation of 100bb/100, the 95% range around your true win rate is:
| Hands played | Your true win rate could be off by |
|---|---|
| 10,000 | ± 19.6bb/100 |
| 50,000 | ± 8.8bb/100 |
| 100,000 | ± 6.2bb/100 |
| 500,000 | ± 2.8bb/100 |
After 10,000 hands at 7.5bb/100, you could be a big winner — or a small loser on a heater. Plug your own numbers into our variance calculator to see the range.
How to raise your win rate
- Choose softer games. Table selection adds more bb/100 than almost any strategy change — see game selection.
- Cut rake. Rakeback and lower-rake sites add directly to your win rate.
- Fix your biggest leak. Review your losing sessions — our session reviews lesson shows how.
Related
#bankroll#maths#study#cash-games
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