Do you get frustrated playing poker tournaments? You play all the time and it seems like you never cash. And even when you do, you cash the minimum. Every once in a while you get teased with a deep run only to run Kings into Aces – resulting in another broken mouse.

• Poker Session
• Poker Session Win Rate Chart

Well as you gain experience, you learn that in order to be successful as a poker player you need to get comfortable with running bad. This is even more prevalent if you are a poker tournament specialist. But no matter how experienced you are, these bad runs can test you and make you question your skill level. This is especially true if you are an amateur poker player who only plays a handful of tournaments a week. You can actually go months without cashing and this duration of time in between cashes can skew your view of reality and affect your play.

Now if you read enough poker forums and websites you will hear about all the online tournament pros who are regularly taking down five and six-figure cashes. They paint this picture of guys constantly making final tables and raking in mounds of cash. You may even be a bit jealous and wonder, “what do those guys have that I don’t?” Well, I’m hoping this article will help answer that question and provide some much needed perspective on the topics of volume and variance.

Online Poker » Poker Strategy » Math » ROI. It is very important for all players to look at poker as a life long session. All the plays you make, beats you take and money won simply does not mean much of anything in a short span of time. What will matter is how these stats look after a player has played thousands and thousands of hands or games. This will be referred to as a poker session. I will be doing the bulk of my analysis on a session by session basis. Sometimes Linn ends his session with more money than he started and sometimes not. As we know there is a fair bit of luck in poker but the winning players win in the long run not because of luck but because of their actions. James and Chris discuss how you really need to be thinking about win rate, what's possible in the 'tough' 2020 cash games and how they each have used win rate data throughout their careers. PokerStars PA has announced the return of its largest online poker tournament in Pennsylvania. Track your poker statistics and avoid the sharks. SharkScope is the most complete database of poker tournament results available and covers virtually all online poker sites.

Amateur Poker Players vs. Pros

Amateurs – For the purpose of this article, an amateur player is someone who plays about 1-3 times per week, usually at night. They have a “real job” and may have a family or are in college full time, so they can only put in part-time hours. But make no mistake, this player is serious about the game and spends time on poker forums, watching training videos, etc. Since we’re talking about tournament poker, the amateur in this article plays mostly large field no-limit hold’em tournaments. They may be a winning player, break even or maybe a slight loser in the game thus far in their career.

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Pros – A professional is someone who plays online poker for their sole source of income. For this article, we are using those who specialize in large field online poker tournaments.

The Stats

Before reading too deep into these numbers, keep in mind that the purpose of this article is to provide perspective into your own results by comparing them to the results of other players. It is not meant to be a scientific study.

The numbers below represent an average of 10 players from each category and use results from both Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars from 2010. The pro stats were taken from 1/1/10 until 8/22/10 and the amateur stats were taken from 1/1/10 until 9/20/10. They only include tournaments with over 180 players.

* Pro stats were taken from a ranking of the top 10 online tournament players. Amateur stats were taken from a sample of 10 amateur players who volunteered their screen name for use in this study.

**Avg. Played/Day is based on a 5 day week, but also only includes playing 2 sites. Actual volume per day may be larger for those who play more than 2 sites and less than 5 days a week.

What Do These Stats Mean?

As you can see, the pros are not these mythical beasts who cash all the time and final table every tournament. Media attention can sometimes give off a false reality as it only highlights their wins and never mentions how many losses it took to get there.

The realities are:

• Even the top pros only win tournaments less than 1% of the time. For some it was as low as 0.60%. So this means they are winning only 1 out of every 100 times. Of course variance doesn’t always come on schedule and they can go 200-300 tournaments without a win.
• Top pros only final table around 3% of the time. Some are as low as 2%.
• Top pros are only cashing about 13% of the time. This means they lose money 87% of the time they play! In fact, amateurs cash more often than pros. The difference is that when pros do cash, they cash deep more often.
• Pros have massive downswings like everyone else. In fact, becasue of the volume they play, they have had longer non-cash streaks.

Why have the pros averaged a $400,000 profit this year before September? It is in their ability to close tournaments. There is a reason why their ROI is 58% higher. Let’s look at the stats:

• Pros make 1/3 more final tables than amateur poker players.
• At a 9 person final table, the average of hitting top 3 should be 33%. Pros are hitting this 43.61% of the time.
• Of the times they cash, pros are final tabling almost twice as often as amateurs (23.9% compared to 12.8%).
• Pros finish in the top 3 almost 3x as often as amateurs.
• Volume, volume, volume. Let’s not forget that pros play all day, every day. This is their job. They have a distinct advantage of overcoming bad variance much quicker and also seeing “the long run” of making profitable decisions quicker.

Keep in mind that the group of amateurs used were volunteers from various poker forums. While not all were winning players, the fact that they study the game says they likely have better results than an average amateur. Also, because of their volume size an individual amateur’s skills may be better or worse than their results show.

Improving Your Game

How can you use these stats to improve your game?

Add More Tables

Get outside of your 1-3 tabling comfort zone and simply add a couple more tables. I know the argument is that it’s harder to make reads, but the volume you put in will make up for that. In addition, this extra volume means you are playing more hands and will result in improving your game even faster. This extra experience will more than make up for the short-term loss of a perfect read.

Play More Days

Just try to add 1 more day per week. Don’t be lazy. If you currently play 7 tournaments a day, adding 1 more day x 52 weeks = 364 more tournaments/year. Even at the amateur ROI average above of 20% and average buy-in of $30, that means an extra $2,184 in profit.

Stop Caring About Individual Tournaments

It’s easy to expend emotional energy in any single poker tournament. You’re trying to win of course. But the odds are that you’re not going to. In fact, you’re only going to cash about 15% of the time. All you can do is focus on making good decisions and the variance will work itself out in the end.

Play for the Win

There’s a reason why amateurs cash more than pros. They care more about it and tighten up near the bubble. But you will miss out on valuable opportunities to accumulate chips if you are playing just to cash. In addition, you can’t fear busting or making a mistake when you get deep. In order to make real money playing poker tournaments, you have to trust your instincts and play to win.

If you’ve ever grown frustrated playing poker tournaments, don’t sweat it. Keep in perspective that even the best players in the world don’t win that often. The only way to balance out negative variance is to put in enough volume where your skill can prevail.

Good luck at the tables.

By Donovan Panone

Donovan started playing poker in 2004 and is an experienced tournament and cash game player who has a passion for teaching and helping others improve their game.

1. Great, revealing article. Stats like these are very encouraging. Thanks, Donovan

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Some people believe that poker is intuitive. They believe that winning players can “feel” when their cards are coming and they “know” when their inside straight is going to fill. I believe that those people are idiots.

Poker is a game of exploiting probabilities. Every read that we get on a player helps us to narrow down their probable holdings and judge how likely we are to beat that player. If the pot is laying us good enough pot odds, we play. If the pot isn’t, we fold. It’s as simple as that.

Unfortunately none of us are poker robots and we make mistakes. We play hands that we shouldn’t be playing and we make moves that we shouldn’t be making and we lose money every time we do it. Here’s how to analyze your game to spot these poker blunders so you can eliminate them.

Buy Tracking Software
All of the tips in this article can be done without poker tracking software but it’s tedious and time consuming work. A program like PokerTracker will save you hours of data entry or worse, writing it out by hand. There are several free poker software programs floating around as well.

Review Your Hand Histories Daily
No software needed for this one. Skim through your hand histories the day after your poker session and watch all of the hands you got involved in. Note which hands you raised and when you raised them. Are you playing tight enough? Are you playing too tight? Are you paying attention to position?
Make sure you also watch how you reacted to other players’ moves. You’ll be surprised what you notice when you watch your game when you’re emotionally removed from the situation.

Analyze Your Win Rate Hand By Hand
Here’s where poker software starts coming in handy. Pay attention to which hands make you money and which hands lose you money. Are you losing cash on suited connectors? Then stop playing them or study how to play them correctly. Are you making less money with pocket Aces than you are with Ace-King? Then analyze your play and see where you’re making mistakes.

Analyze Your Win Rate By Position
Late poker table position should make you more money that earlier positions. If any one position shows a significantly higher loss than the others, start looking at your play to see if you’re playing too loose.

Analyze Your Win Rate By Player
Poker software like PokerTracker can tell you how much you win or lose against a certain player. The software can even typecast the player’s style. Find the five or six players you lose the most money to and analyze their playing style. I bet all of them will be similar. This information will tell you if you’re playing poorly against a particular type of player. Once you know that you play poorly against loose-aggressive or tight-aggressive players, you can look at your hand histories and find out why.

Poker Session

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Poker Session Win Rate Chart

The best poker players are constantly learning and evolving their game. By analyzing your play and plugging you leaks, you’ll make yourself a better player and drastically increase your win rate.