In big blinds per 100 hands: 1–4 is a solid winner, 5–9 is excellent, and 10+ is elite and usually only seen at the smallest stakes. But any of those numbers is meaningless under ~50,000 hands — below that, the figure is mostly noise.
“Good” depends on the stake, the format, and the era — but the unit is always the same: bb/100, big blinds won per 100 hands, which strips out stake and volume so you can compare like with like. Here’s the honest landscape.
The win-rate tiers
| Win rate | What it means |
|---|---|
| 0 bb/100 | Break-even before rake — effectively a small loser once the room takes its cut. |
| 1–4 bb/100 | A solid, clearly winning rate at most stakes. The realistic target for a good regular. |
| 5–9 bb/100 | Excellent. Strong-regular territory; hard to sustain as you move up. |
| 10+ bb/100 | Elite, and almost always confined to the softest low-stakes games. |
Why a “lower” win rate can be the better player
Win rates compress as you climb. The competition stiffens and the easy money dries up, so a modest-looking 3 bb/100 at high stakes can represent a far better — and far more lucrative — player than 12 bb/100 at the micros. Don’t read the raw number without the stake attached.
Cash vs tournaments
bb/100 is a cash-game unit. Tournament results are usually measured in ROI (return on investment) instead, because you’re buying into prize pools rather than playing a continuous chip count. A positive long-run tournament ROI of 10–30% is strong, but tournament variance is wilder still, so the sample-size problem below is even more severe. You can work out your own on the tournament ROI calculator.
The part most guides skip: your number is probably noise
Here’s the uncomfortable truth. A win rate is an average, and an average from a small sample carries a huge margin of error. Over a few thousand hands, a true break-even player can easily show 8 bb/100, and a genuine winner can show a loss. The tidy figure your tracker displays is often statistical fog.
Roughly 50,000 hands is the floor before a win rate carries any weight, and 100,000+ before it’s reasonably trustworthy. That’s not a StackWise opinion — it falls straight out of the maths of standard deviation. See exactly how many hands your rate needs in the sample-size guide.
Enter your observed rate, hands, and standard deviation into the win-rate confidence calculator to see the range your true rate most likely sits in. If that range still crosses zero, you can’t yet call yourself a winner — no matter how good the headline looks.
So — what should you aim for?
A realistic, durable goal for most players is a clearly positive rate in the 1–5 bb/100 band, measured over a sample big enough to believe. Chasing a bigger headline number over a tiny sample is how players talk themselves into stakes their bankroll and their edge can’t actually support.
See a win rate you can actually trust.
StackWise pairs every win rate with a confidence range and a sample-size label, and withholds the headline number until your data earns it. Free to start, no account.
