Looking at earn rates and what are respectable earn rates in poker is often a confusing subject. What is a good earn rate for one player is not for someone else and the ever changing table dynamics makes the situation even more complex. To start things off then I will look at what is a generalised standard for calculating earn rates as you will no doubt have seen ptbb/hour or ptbb/100 in some of my articles and wondered what it meant.
Well the term ptbb refers to PokerTracker big bets which are twice the big blind. This dates back to the days of limit hold’em where players used to calculate big bets and not big blinds and big bets are twice the size of the big blind in limit play. So when you see ptbb/100 then this is not the same as bb/100 as PokerTracker uses the measure of twice the big blind.
So an earn rate of 5ptbb/100 at say NL100 would be $2 x 5 = $10/100 and not $5/100 which confuses a lot of people. I think as you go through certain levels then all we can look at are earnings ranges and nothing can be definite. A sample size of 100k hands will not be high enough for confidence levels to be high and you often have wildly fluctuating results over different 100k sample sizes.
I always calculate rakeback and bonuses in my earnings but some players do not and there are very good reasons for doing so. Firstly let us say that you have made $3000 in a given month but all that 3k came in rakeback while you recycled money in the actual games themselves. This certainly indicates that you may not be ready to move up a level if you technically cannot make money at a level without rakeback.
You could make 5k in rakeback at the higher level and if you can stay recycling money then that will be a good move. But if you were losing say $1500/month due to the games being tougher then the decision isn’t so clear cut anymore! Over the coming posts I want to look at what I personally consider to be fair earnings ranges for most of the levels starting at NL10 and above both for FR and six max which I think should prove valuable for many readers.
Carl “The Dean” Sampson plays at www.pokerloco.com so why not join him quoting bonus code DEAN600?
Carl can also be contacted at Carl@Pokerquest.f9.co.uk for writing, coaching and other poker related activities.
