Win Rate
Your average profit per unit of play — big blinds per 100 hands online, dollars per hour live.
Cash-game players measure success in big blinds per 100 hands (bb/100): win $200 over 1,000 hands at $1/$2 and you're running at 10bb/100, which is excellent. Live players usually think in dollars per hour, and the conversion is easy: at 30 hands an hour, 10bb/100 at $1/$2 is about $6 an hour. Both numbers say the same thing — how fast the game pays you — and both are meaningless without a sample size.
On sample size: variance makes small samples nearly worthless. A 5bb/100 winner can run below break-even for tens of thousands of hands online; live, where 500 hours is a big sample, you can play a whole year and still not know your true rate within a factor of two. Anyone quoting a win rate from 20 sessions is quoting their mood.
What counts as good? Online at low stakes, 5bb/100 after rake is a strong regular. Live low stakes, the rake is heavier and the opposition softer, and $10–$20 an hour at $1/$2 marks a genuinely good player. The rake does quiet violence to all these numbers — a player beating the game for $12 an hour while paying $15 an hour in rake is a loser with a winner's skills. Anything above that and you're either elite or running hot.
The only honest way to know your number is to track every session — a session tracker makes this painless — logging hours, stakes, venue and result. Memory keeps the wins and files the losses under "bad luck"; the record doesn't. Six months of logged sessions at your home game will tell you more about your poker than any book, including whether the game itself, after rake and tips, is worth your Tuesdays.