Bloggers / Matthew Pitt / 27 April 2009 / Leave a comment

Regardless of of the stakes you play or whether you are a professional or a recreational player, you should be keeping records of any profits and losses incurred from poker. After all, you need or at least should want to know which particular games are profitable for you and which ones you should avoid like the plague or work on improving.

Take a look at the leaderboards on some of the SnG tracking sites and you will notice that hardly anyone has an ROI over 10%, over a meaningful sample size, and that they all play 10-20 tables at once.

Cash game players generally keep tabs on their win rate in terms of big blinds won per 100 hands, often displayed on forums and blog entries as BB/100. For example, imagine you have played 1,000 hands of NL100 with blinds $0.50/$1 and you win $100, your earn rate over this sample would be 10BB/100 ($100 winnings divided by 1,000 hands, multiplied by 100)

Tournament players often record their results in terms of Return On Investment or ROI. To calculate this figure you need to take any profit and divide it by the total costs of entering the games and then multiply by 100. So as an example, if you played 100x $11 SnG and won $100 then your ROI would be 9.09% ($100 profit, divided by $1100 in entry fees, multiplied by 100).

Whilst having a large ROI or BB/100 is what a lot of players strive for, if you are in this game to make money then you should really be looking to increase your hourly rate and be willing to sacrifice your ROI in order to do this. If you have limited time to play or indeed play part or full time, you want to be maximising your profits with the time you have at the tables.

Many factors have an effect on ROI, mainly the quality of the opposition, the structure of the blinds and the number of tables played simultaneously. Take a look at the leaderboards on some of the SnG tracking sites and you will notice that hardly anyone has an ROI over 10%, over a meaningful sample size, and that they all play 10-20 tables at once.

Surely they would be better off playing less tables and increasing their ROI? You would think so but many of the top players play for a living so what matters to them is their hourly wage. If a players can win with an ROI of 10% at the $55 games by playing 10 tables at once, assuming each set of 10 games lasts one hour, he will earn on average $55 per hour. The same player is also capable of playing 20 tables but when he does his ROI drops as low as 6%. Although his ROI has dropped significantly, he is actually earning more money, in fact he's earning $11 more per hour.

The same runs true for BB/100 too so the next time you check out someone's stats and see their ROI or BB/100 is at the lower end of the scale, do not assume they are a poor player, instead see if they are playing multiple tables because it may turn out this potential fish is actually a business shrewd shark.

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