Poker Profitability Outlook
A win rate is not a salary — it's the average of a hundred very different years. Enter yours, with your stakes and volume, and this tool simulates 200 of those years: the profit you should actually expect, the range around it, the downswings on the way, the losing months a winning player still posts, and the bankroll that survives all of it. Free, no signup.
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The honest year, at a glance
Simulated reference values (4,000 trials per row): 40,040 hands over a year at the standard 80bb/100 standard deviation. All figures in big blinds — divide by 100 for buy-ins.
| Win rate | Median year | Realistic range | Losing year | Losing month | Worst downswing (median) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| -2 bb/100 | -786 bb | -2,859 → 1,247 | 69% | 56% | −1,986 bb |
| 0 bb/100 | 0 bb | -2,086 → 2,062 | 50% | 50% | −1,577 bb |
| +2 bb/100 | 807 bb | -1,298 → 2,865 | 31% | 44% | −1,305 bb |
| +5 bb/100 | 1,988 bb | -159 → 4,009 | 12% | 36% | −1,023 bb |
| +8 bb/100 | 3,121 bb | 1,186 → 5,249 | 2% | 29% | −837 bb |
What this table is really saying
Read the +2 row closely: a genuine winning player books a losing month 44% of the time and a losing year nearly one time in three. Variance is loud enough to drown a small edge for months — which cuts both ways: your bad stretch may prove nothing, and your winning streak may prove just as little. The one lever that moves every column at once is the win rate itself — and at low stakes the gap between −2 and +5 is usually 2–3 repeated, fixable mistakes. The free 2-minute leak quiz finds your most expensive one — no email, no signup.
Variance & profitability FAQ
How big a downswing is normal in poker?
Bigger than feels fair. In our simulations (40,000 hands/year, 80bb/100 std dev), even a solid 5bb/100 winner's median worst downswing of the year is about 1,000 big blinds — 10 full buy-ins — and one bad year in ten reaches 1,800bb. A breakeven player's median worst run is nearly 1,600bb. Downswings of this size are the cost of playing, not evidence something broke.
Can a winning player have a losing month?
Routinely. At 5bb/100 over roughly 3,000 hands a month, about 36% of months lose — one in three. At 2bb/100 it's 44%, nearly a coin flip. A losing month tells you almost nothing about your skill; a losing year starts to, but even the 5bb/100 winner posts one 12% of the time.
How many hands do you need to know your win rate?
More than almost anyone has. Your measured win rate over N hands has a standard error of about 80 ÷ √(N/100) bb/100 — so after 10,000 hands the error bar is ±8bb/100, and even 100,000 hands only narrows it to ±2.5. This is why 'I'm up over 5,000 hands' means very little, and why diagnosing specific leaks beats staring at a graph.
What win rate is realistic in low-stakes cash games?
Solid regs at micro and low stakes commonly sustain 3–8bb/100; exceptional players in soft games can run higher. The brutal math is on the other side: the average player is negative once rake is counted. The difference between −2 and +5 is rarely talent — it's a handful of repeated, fixable mistakes.
Is this the same as a bankroll calculator?
It contains one. The bankroll figure here uses the classic risk-of-ruin formula on your inputs, but the outlook shows the rest of the picture that number lives in: what the year that bankroll must survive actually looks like — the bands, the downswings, and the losing stretches a winning player still endures.