How to Calculate Your Poker Hourly Rate: Complete Guide for 2025

Understanding your poker hourly rate is essential for any serious player. Whether you're a recreational player curious about your results or a professional evaluating your career, knowing your true hourly earnings helps you make better decisions about stakes, game selection, and time management.

What is Poker Hourly Rate?

Your poker hourly rate is simply how much money you win (or lose) per hour of play. It's calculated by dividing your total profit or loss by the number of hours played.

Basic Formula: Hourly Rate = Total Profit / Hours Played

For example, if you won $300 over a 6-hour session, your hourly rate for that session was $50/hour.

Why Hourly Rate Matters

1. Career Planning

If you're considering poker as a primary income source, knowing your hourly rate helps you compare it to other job opportunities and determine if it's financially viable.

2. Game Selection

Different games and stakes produce different hourly rates. Tracking this helps you identify your most profitable games.

3. Time Management

Understanding when you perform best (time of day, session length) can dramatically improve your overall earnings.

Calculating Net Playing Time

One common mistake is including break time in your calculations. If you played for 8 hours but took a 1-hour dinner break, your net playing time is 7 hours.

Adjusted Formula: Hourly Rate = Total Profit / (Session Length - Break Time)

Understanding BB/Hour

Big blinds per hour (BB/hr) is the industry standard for measuring win rates because it normalizes results across different stakes.

BB/Hour Formula: BB/hr = (Total Profit / Big Blind Size) / Hours Played

What's a Good BB/Hour?

• Live Cash Games: 5-10 BB/hr is excellent
• Online Cash Games: 3-8 BB/hr is strong
• Lower Stakes: Higher BB/hr is achievable
• Higher Stakes: 2-5 BB/hr is still profitable

Session ROI

Return on Investment (ROI) shows your profit as a percentage of your starting stack.

ROI Formula: ROI = (Ending Stack - Starting Stack) / Starting Stack × 100

This metric helps you understand how efficiently you're growing your bankroll each session.

Tips for Improving Your Hourly Rate

1. Track Everything

Use a bankroll tracker to record every session. Over time, patterns emerge that can help you optimize your play.

2. Optimize Session Length

Many players perform best in 4-6 hour sessions. Playing too long can lead to fatigue and poor decisions.

3. Game Selection

Choose tables with recreational players when possible. Your hourly rate is significantly impacted by table composition.

4. Minimize Unproductive Time

Breaks are necessary, but excessive breaks reduce your effective hourly rate. Plan breaks strategically during slow periods.

5. Move Up Responsibly

Higher stakes mean higher potential hourly rates, but only if you can maintain your BB/hr win rate.

Using Our Free Calculator

Our free poker hourly calculator makes it easy to:

• Calculate your exact hourly rate
• Track BB/hour performance
• Account for break time accurately
• Project daily, weekly, and monthly earnings
• Calculate session ROI

Sample Variance and Long-Term Thinking

Poker has significant variance. A single session's hourly rate means very little statistically. You need hundreds of hours of data to get a meaningful picture of your true win rate.

Minimum Sample Sizes:

• Basic accuracy: 100+ hours
• Moderate confidence: 300+ hours
• High confidence: 1000+ hours

Conclusion

Calculating your poker hourly rate is fundamental to understanding your performance and making informed decisions about your poker career. Use our free tools to track every session and build a complete picture of your results over time.

Remember: short-term results are mostly noise. Focus on making good decisions, and the hourly rate will take care of itself in the long run.

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Start tracking your sessions today with Manage Bankroll - the free bankroll management tool for poker players.