You can get pretty involved into dissecting percentages when you’re playing poker and you’re in it for the long haul. You stop looking at hands individually and start looking at them by the hundreds…or thousands. What you’re doing here is simply gauging your win ratio – to see how you’re doing and assess whether you’re really at a level where the game is worth your time.
Let’s break it down and look at a 100-hand level. Have you ever stepped back and thought about how many hands you win over the course of 100 hands? And how much is each win worth? Sure, you can easily tell whether you’ve won or lost money in a single sitting, but the big picture yields much more telling information on your strengths as a long-term player.
So what’s a great ratio? Is it 5 out of 100? 10? 40? Well, a few other things will ultimately factor in – such as how many other players are at the table, but if you’re clearing the pot 10% of the time, you’re doing pretty darn good. Even 5 is a respectable number. If you figure one of those 5 or two of those 10 wins are a big score, that’s usually enough to cruise through the blind losses of another long sitting. Add to that the fact that you’re not going to be the BB or SB much of the time, and you can start to understand why 5 or 10 hands out of 100 is a good goal to shoot for.
In the end, though, it’s maximizing the wins that makes a difference more than the number itself. You can play 1,000 hands and win 300 big blinds, but bleed the rest of the time and it’s not that impressive. But you can score 20 huge hands and be the champ of the table. So ratio isn’t everything.