Poker ROI
Your Poker ROI is a calculation of how profitable your poker game is. ROI stands for “Rate of Investment”, so your ROI is the difference between how much money you put into your poker game, and how much you get out of it; the difference being your profit.
Calculating Your ROI in Poker
How you calculate your poker ROI is based primarily on what type of poker games you are playing tournaments or cash games.
Calculating Your ROI in Poker Tournaments (MTT and SNG)
The poker ROI for tournament play is generally conveyed as a percentage of the initial buy-in. A player will remove 100% from the final calculation, as 100% is the actual amount paid to enter the tournament.
As an example, we could say you played in 10 poker tournaments, each with a buy-in of $10, plus a $1 fee; $11 total per tournament. All 10 tournaments combined would be $110, that being your 100%.
Now let’s say at the end of all 10 tournaments, your bankroll has risen from $110 to $150. That’s about 136%. Subtract 100% (your initial buy-in cost) and you get an average poker ROI of 36%.
The formula for calculating poker ROI in tournaments is:
(100 / Entry Cost) x Ending Bankroll = Total Percentage
(one-hundred divided by total entry cost, multiplied by your ending bankroll equals cost plus profit percentage)
Total Percentage – 100 = Poker ROI
(cost+profit percentage minus 100 equals poker rate of investment)
Calculating Your ROI in Poker Cash Games
It’s a little more complicated to calculate poker ROI in cash games because time because more of a factor. It is generally deemed wise to calculate poker ROI by every 100 hands. It would be rather difficult, or at least tiresome, to count all hands played in a live poker environment. Fortunately online poker rooms count all hands for you – by session, day and lifetime membership at the online poker site.
We’ll use a typical cash game session in the following example.
Let’s say you play 500 hands of online poker in a single cash game session . You paid $100 to buy-in to the table, and at the end of the day finished with $250 in poker chips. Your poker ROI would be 150%, after subtracting the initial buy-in amount of 100%.
To calculate the poker ROI, you start with $100 (your initial investment) being 100%. Divide the buy-in by 100, then multiply by the ending bankroll of $250. You get 250%, then subtract the initial 100% buy-in for a total poker ROI of 150% per 100 hands.
The formula is basically the same as calculating poker ROI in tournaments:
(Buy-in / 100) x Ending Bankroll = Total Percentage
Total Percentage – 100 = Poker ROI
Poker ROI – Hourly Rates
The information obtained by calculating your poker ROI becomes much more useful when you divide your profits by the time you spend on the virtual felt. You may come out with an awesome $500 profit in poker ROI, but if it took you a month or better to achieve that amount, it’s not nearly so great. Knowing your average profit per hour can help you choose the right game, stakes and online poker site to play at.
To find the hourly rate, divide your total profit by the number of hours you spent playing. If you played poker for 3 hours with a profit of $45, your hourly rate is $15 ($45 / 3 = $15).
The formula for hourly rate is:
Profit / Hours = Hourly Rate
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