August 4, 2026
Hourly rate is the one poker number that survives contact with live play. Big blinds per hundred needs a hand count nobody keeps. Return on investment needs a tournament schedule. Dollars per hour needs a start time, an end time, and what you walked out with, and those three things exist whether you write them down or not.
Which makes it strange how few players can produce theirs.
The obvious objection first: isn’t this all variance? Over any stretch you can realistically play, a lot of it is. An hourly rate built from thirty sessions is an estimate with a wide band around it, and the arithmetic on that is unforgiving.
That’s a separate piece, and it isn’t an argument against counting. It’s an argument against quoting your number to one decimal place. What a win rate is worth as an estimate.
The number people quote is a memory, not a measurement
Ask a regular what he makes an hour and the answer comes back immediately. Ask how many hours are in it and the answer gets vague.
That gap is the whole problem. The figure is usually assembled out of the nights that were worth telling somebody about. The Tuesday where you sat down, lost a buy-in in forty minutes and drove home is not in there. Nobody is lying. Memory keeps the good nights, and a rate built from good nights isn’t a rate.
How to work yours out
Total profit divided by total hours. Both halves are harder than they look.
The hours are seat to seat. From when you sat down to when you stood up, including the stretch where you were card dead and thinking about leaving, including the two orbits you sat out to eat. If you were in the seat, it counts. The temptation is to shave the hours that felt wasted, and shaving hours inflates the rate.
The profit is what you left with minus what you bought in for, and then minus the money that leaves your pocket without ever going through a pot. Dealer tips. The food you bought because you were there for nine hours. Parking. If you drive ninety minutes each way to a room you can argue about whether the drive belongs in the arithmetic, but you can’t argue that it was free.
So what is a good number?
The rule of thumb people repeat is about one big blind an hour. It’s folklore rather than a measured figure and it’s worth what folklore is worth, but it does put a stake in the ground: at 1/2 that’s two dollars an hour, at 2/5 it’s five.
Most players find that insultingly low, which is the useful part. The distance between what a table of regulars believes it makes and what a conservative rule of thumb suggests is where all the interesting questions live.
The honest answer is that a good hourly rate isn’t a figure you can look up. It moves with the stake, the room, the night of the week, and how much of the session you spent in a game you should have left an hour earlier. What it can be measured against is your own other games. You don’t need to know whether twelve dollars an hour is good in the abstract. You need to know that the Friday game pays and the Sunday one doesn’t.
Why your number is probably too high
Three leaks, and they compound.
The first is the sessions you didn’t count. Short losing sessions are the easiest ones to skip, because they’re the ones you leave annoyed. They’re also the ones that pull the average down, which is exactly why leaving them out feels harmless.
The second is rounding. Four hours and forty minutes becomes four. Do that thirty times and you have removed twenty hours from the denominator without removing a dollar from the numerator.
The third is the money that never touched the table. Tips and food are real and they come out of the same pocket. A player making a genuine fifteen an hour who tips five a session and eats twenty is not making fifteen.
What the number is for
Not for telling people. For deciding where to sit.
An hourly rate you trust turns into game selection, which is the only lever most live players have that doesn’t require getting better at poker. Two rooms, same stake, forty hours in each, and one of them pays double. That comparison is worth more than any single figure, and it only exists if both sets of hours were counted the same way.
That last condition is what separates the tracking apps from each other, and it is worth knowing which kind you are downloading before you start. It is also the whole reason StackXo exists. It keeps the start, the end and what you left with, so the hours aren’t something you reconstruct at two in the morning from a photo of your chips. The arithmetic afterwards is trivial. Having inputs you believe is not.
A player who knows he makes eleven an hour at one room and four at another has something to act on tonight. A player who knows he is "a winning player" has a feeling. The distance between those two is a notebook, or an app, and about a season of remembering to use it.