What is bb/100 in poker?

If you measured your poker results in raw dollars, you could never compare them. A good night at 5/10 and a grind at 1/2 aren’t the same thing, and playing more hands inflates the total without telling you anything about your skill. bb/100 fixes both problems at once.

How it works

You count your winnings in big blinds rather than dollars — so a $200 win in a 1/2 game (where the big blind is $2) is 100 big blinds. Then you express it per 100 hands. Win 250 big blinds over 5,000 hands and your rate is 250 ÷ 50 = 5 bb/100. Because both the stake and the hand count are normalised away, the number means the same thing at any level.

What’s a good bb/100?

• 1–4 bb/100 — a solid, clearly winning rate at most stakes.
• 5–9 bb/100 — an excellent rate; a strong regular’s territory.
• 10+ bb/100 — elite, and usually only sustainable at lower stakes where the games are softest.

Higher rates are possible at the micros and tend to compress as you move up and the competition stiffens. A modest-looking 3 bb/100 at high stakes can be far more impressive — and more lucrative — than 12 bb/100 at the bottom.

Live poker and bb/hour

Live players often think in big blinds per hour instead, simply because live games are slow (around 25–30 hands an hour) and hand counts are hard to track at the table. The idea is identical — a stake-neutral rate — just measured against time rather than hands.

The catch nobody mentions

bb/100 is a clean unit, but a clean unit measured over a dirty sample is still unreliable. A win rate off a few thousand hands has an enormous margin of error, so the tidy number can be badly wrong. Before you trust your bb/100, find out how many hands it takes to make it meaningful.