What are your winning NL sessions like?

I'm just wondering whether better players find there's a predictable pace to a winning session. Say, you're playing 25 NL. What is a reasonable and desirable win rate? Do you expect to double your buy-in in an hour or two? Or are you happy to make $5 or $10 on your $25 buy-in?

For me, I don't find that I make gains gradually. It's not a smooth line. I'm not up a couple bucks after a half hour, then a couple more after another half hour. I do a lot of treading water, then the gains usually come from one or two big hands. I might double my money after an hour or two, then tread water again until the next big hand comes along. When I play live, which isn't too often, I usually win, and almost invariably my gains come from one or two big hands over the course of an evening.

I've been playing on Bodog where I don't use pokerTracker, but I've been morphing from LAG to TAG, and am having more success at TAG. My % flops seen is usually between 15% and 20% and I'm passing up a lot of speculative hands, especially in early position, that I used to play.

What it amounts to is I'm trying to develop a winning style, and I'm asking you folks who win consistently what your typical session might look like: steady gains or wins coming in bursts? Have many of you improved your results by going from LAG to TAG?

Thank you in advance for your responses.
Gary

I try to play a TAG game at full ring, and my sessions are much the same as yours. The gains will come in occasional big pots. I try to keep my treading water profitable (or at least break-even) by stealing blinds whenever the situation presents.

As for actual win-rate, I tend to float between 1-6 PTBB/100, which is big bets every hundred hands. At $0.25/$0.50, for example, that translates to $1-$6/100 hands.

Provided you are playing at the right stakes for your bankroll, I find that multi-tabling spreads out those gains/losses, and gives you a more steady win-rate. Just be careful not to add so many tables that your game suffers.

Are you referring to a limit game? I thought one BB per hour is supposed to be a good rate in limit. I don't know the expression PTBB. Thanks for your response.

Winrate in both NL and FL is measured by big bets (2x the big blind) per hundred hands, also referred to ptbb/100 or BB/100.

You shouldn't be paying any attention to what you're winning or losing in a session, but rather how you can make the best decisions in every hand. You could be playing perfect poker every hand and still have a disastrous run over a day's session or even a week, over a month or more. So paying attention to how 'good' you're doing by measuring it in how much you're winning is going to mislead you.

I agree with you in principle that you should not look at whether you are winning or losing during a given session but I find that incredibly hard to do. Agreed that making good decisions reads etc is the most important and that if you will do that, the $ will take care of itself....but dang it is hard not to look at your results per session/table while it is happening. Maybe I need to turn my hold'em manager graph off.

But to answer the op's question....yes I find, as will most poker players, that most of your wins or losses will come over relatively few hands. The rest of the time you are just folding, stealing blinds and "treading water".

Best reminder I've had in a long time, txs.

Yeah, a valid point. I think it would have been better worded with "Ideally..." before it. I mean I myself can't help but look at results too often, but I can't stress enough for the newer player to kick this habit asap.

Thanks for the replies. I realize the main point is to make correct decisions. But I've been running good lately, with 7 or 8 winning sessions in a row, and I notice that my winning sessions have a symmetry to them. It's what I described above: tight steady play with one or two big hands that account for most of the gains.

This is in contrast to when I'm running bad, when I tend to play too many hands and chase draws.

The gist if the question is how to play winning poker and what that feels like. And I know every session is going to be different. Sometimes it's slow and steady. Sometimes even the best decisions have bad results, but they were still the right decision. But much of the time, winning poker is a treading-water kind of grind where you wait for your chances to strike. It's because that strategy yields good results that the winning sessions turn out to have that structure. Often.

You shouldn't expect to win in a smooth gradual line because for the vast majority of players most or all of their win rate comes from showdown pots, and big showdown pots don't happen all that often.

When you combine sessions, you aren't going to be winning in a smooth line that is close to your overall $$/hr either, because losing sessions greatly affect your win rate.

Say you win at $100/hr when you are winning and lose at $50/hr when you are losing. If you play several winning sessions that total 12 hours, your $$/hr is $100 and you won $1200. If you now play a 4 hour session and lose at $50/hr you have now won $1000 over 16 hrs, so your win rate has dropped to $62/hr. So losing for 1/3rd the time you were winning and only losing at 1/2 the rate you win at costs your win rate almost -40%.

Such is the nature of poker...your swings within a session and between sessions in general are going to be much larger than your average.

I agree, with one caveat. Keep an eye on your bankroll, and make sure that you're still rolled for your current stakes.