Looking at Win Rates

Would I be correct in thinking that BB/100 is a way to evaluate your level of playing while BB/hour is a way to evaluate your profits and $/hr?

in general yes. But, if you 1 table you should probably have a higher BB/100 than somebody that 12 tables. Is the person who 1 tables a better poker player? I personally think BB/hour is more important overall (since the *purpose* of poker is to make money) but BB/100 would give you a better idea of how well you are beating a certain level.

Right so if you want to decide whether or not to move up in stakes you should look at your BB/100 right?

BB/100 is one element; bankroll is more important.

Then there's whether or not you have enough hands at the level for your BB/100 to be reliable. And various other considerations, but if your win rate is decent, you have the bankroll, and you've played enough hands for the win rate to be representative, then I'd say there's no reason to take a shot.

On the other hand, there's no reason to force it either, if you're lacking confidence or have leaks that you already know of.

Just don't get stuck believing that you shouldn't or can't step back again.

How many hands is enough?

Well if I told you players can 50k hand break even streches, then that may give you some indication that taking a 5 or 10k hand sample might not be enough to judge whether or not your beating it.

It's difficult to give a hand figure, but I would say most players would look to have a 20k+ figure to give some sort of relevance. For me I would be looking at 100k hands tbh.

is there a good site that can tell you your cash games win rate or should you use poker tracker or is there another software site similar to pokertracker that anyone uses?and do any of the poker sites give you this kind of information? seems that if they did it would be a nice perk?

long break even stretches are somewhat dependent on stakes however. a good player should never have a break even stretch of that long at low stakes like NL25/50/even 100, because your edge at those stakes is substantially higher than at something like NL1k or NL10k. Even if you run like crap at lower stakes, there always tend to be plenty of players willing to stack off in stupid situations. When your edge is much smaller, the negative variance is much harder to overcome, because you don't have alot of players spewing money everywhere.

That said, 10k at a minimum but i think you need at least 20k to have somewhat of an idea. You probably need 50k+ to have an accurate BB/100.