Live vs Online Poker Bankroll Tracking: What Changes and Why It Matters

Live and online poker are the same game played at very different speeds. That difference changes what you need to record, which units make sense, what your real costs are and, most of all, how long it takes before your results mean anything.

This article goes through what changes between the two, with numbers, and what that means for how you track your bankroll if you play one, the other or both.

Key takeaways

• An online player at four tables sees about ten times as many hands per hour as a live player. Everything about sample size follows from that.
• Live results are best measured per hour, online results per 100 hands. Use both units if you play both.
• Live poker has costs outside the pot: travel, food, tips, time charges and hotels. Leave them out and your hourly rate is fiction.
• Knowing a live win rate within ±5 bb/100 takes thousands of hours. Plan your bankroll for a long period of uncertainty.

Hands per hour changes everything

A live table deals about 30 hands an hour. A single online table deals around 75, and many online players run four or more at once. Using the same standard deviation of 90 bb/100 for both, here is how long it takes before the 95% range on a win rate shrinks to a useful width:

Hours of play before the 95% range on a win rate narrows to each margin

Setting	Hands per hour	Hours to know it within ±10 bb/100	Hours to know it within ±5 bb/100
Live, one table	30	1,040	4,150
Online, one table	75	410	1,660
Online, four tables	300	100	410

A live player needs about 1,040 hours just to know their win rate within ±10 bb/100, a range so wide that it still includes both losing and very strong players. Within ±5 takes about 4,150 hours: at 15 hours a week, more than five years.

That is not a reason to give up on tracking. It is the reason live players should track everything: their own results are the only data they have, and they accumulate slowly.

Per hour or per 100 hands

Online, hands are counted for you, so the natural unit is big blinds per 100 hands (bb/100). Live, nobody counts hands, so the natural unit is per hour: money per hour or big blinds per hour.

They convert into each other through hands per hour:

bb per hour = bb/100 × hands per hour ÷ 100

A live player winning 10 bb/100 at 30 hands an hour makes 3 big blinds an hour, which is $6 an hour at 1/2. An online player winning 5 bb/100 at four tables of 75 hands makes 15 big blinds an hour, $15 an hour at NL100. The live player has twice the win rate per hand and a fifth of the big blinds per hour. The hourly rate calculator does the conversion for your own numbers.

If you play both, record hours for every session, online too. It is the only unit that lets you compare a live evening with an online one, and it is what you need for any decision about where to spend your time.

Costs: the part of live poker your results leave out

Online, the rake comes out of the pots and is already in your results. Rakeback and rewards come back on top, and it is worth tracking them separately so you can see what your play earns on its own.

Live poker has a second set of costs that never touch the table:

• travel, parking and fuel;
• food and drinks at the casino;
• dealer tips, which add up quickly at a full table;
• a time charge, where the room charges per half hour instead of raking pots;
• hotel nights and flights on poker trips.

None of these appear in "bought in for $300, cashed out for $420". All of them come out of your bankroll. A live player who wins $10 an hour at the table and spends $4 an hour on travel, food and tips makes $6 an hour. Track expenses per session, and look at your hourly rate both before and after them.

Swings per hour

More hands per hour means more swing per hour, in big blinds. Over one hour, the standard deviation of a live player's result at 30 hands is about 49 big blinds; for the online player at four tables it is about 156.

But the edge grows faster than the swing: hands per hour multiply the expected result, and only the square root of them multiplies the swing. Over 100 hours, the live player winning 10 bb/100 is still behind about 27% of the time, while the online player winning 5 bb/100 at four tables is behind about 17% of the time. More volume makes results converge sooner, even at a lower win rate per hand.

What to record in each

The core of a session record is the same everywhere: date, game, stakes, buy-ins, cash-out, time played. The details differ.

Live sessions:

• start and end time, minus breaks;
• every buy-in, including rebuys and add-ons, not just the total;
• venue, and the table or game if the room runs several;
• expenses for the session;
• a line of notes: table conditions, how you played, anything unusual.

Online sessions:

• site and game type;
• number of tables and hours;
• result per session, or per day if you play many short sessions;
• rakeback or rewards credited, kept apart from the result;
• deposits, withdrawals and currency conversions, which move the bankroll without being results.

Online players who use a hand-history tracker such as PokerTracker or Hold'em Manager already have detailed numbers for the hands, but those tools do not cover live play, expenses or money held off the sites. A bankroll tracker or spreadsheet covers the money side. The poker session log article has a full list of fields and why each one is worth recording.

One bankroll or two?

There is no single right answer. Some players keep one bankroll; others keep separate ones, often because live play needs cash at hand while online money sits on sites, or because they play in different currencies.

What matters is:

1. every game you play has enough buy-ins under your own bankroll rule;
2. you can see the total at any time;
3. your results are tagged so you can split them by live and online, by stake and by format.

The third point is the one players skip. A combined win rate across live and online games is a blend of two very different numbers, and it hides which one is paying for the other.

Tracking both in one place

A spreadsheet can handle both if you are disciplined about columns; the free poker bankroll spreadsheet has one ready to copy. A bankroll tracker app does the same with less typing, especially at a live table. PokerRoll is built for this mix: it times live sessions as they happen, with rebuys and add-ons, records online sessions after the fact, handles 16 currencies and marks every session as live or online. It does not record expenses yet, so live players who want their hourly rate after costs should note them per session, or keep the spreadsheet alongside.