Barry Tanenbaum has another great column up this week. This time he's discussing what makes a winning player, how long it takes to actually calculate if you are a winning player, and exactly what you should work into your calculations to determine if you are a winning player.Ahem. Sorry.
Of course, if you're screwing around in a casino with your buddies, like some of us did during the WSOP, and you're pounding drinks and trying to tilt your buddies, then you just factor the rake (and whatever money you spend trying to catch your two outer to put me on mega-tilt, Amy Calistri) into the cost of your entertainment.
Anyway, Barry makes several very good points that any hopeful professional should consider, not the least of which is always keeping track of the rake (easy if you're playing online, probably tougher to estimate if you're playing live) so you know if you're actually winning or not. Barry recommends a tool called StatKing to track your win rates.
Barry also discusses ways to figure out if you're winning as a tournament player, and what's an acceptable BB/hr rate in both limit and no-limit games. He also takes a look at, and offers a good return for SNG players. Yes, I'm being deliberately vague because Barry is a friend, and I don't want to jack his entire post, so follow the link, and fill your head with all kinds of useful facts.
1. You're sort of mucking up what he said. He said when people REPORT their winnings on his forum, sometimes they say, "not counting rake". But if you sit at the table and get up $10 ahead, you really are $10 ahead, because the house already took your rake.
In the world of teh online, since pokertracker shows your win/loss AND your rake, it's easy to exclude it if you want.
Posted at 12:17AM on Nov 28th 2006 by MattW