How to know if you're a Winning Player?

In tournaments, even good players can play 100 tournaments without any significant winnings. If you play 2 per week, that would be a year. And if you are not clearly better than average opponent, the stretch might be even longer. Or you can run hot and win couple of those per month. Variance is a strange thing.

Poker has randomness, and with skill you can only make your probabilities better. But no skill can make you 100% sure winner. The more you play, the more those probabilities start to kick in. Example would be a dice game:

We roll a die, if it's 1 or 2 you win, if it's 3,4,5 or 6 I win. Now if we roll just once, you have decent 33% probability to win. So if we roll once a day, there is still decent chance that you end up being a winner after a week. But if we roll 100 times a day, it would mean 700 rolls in a week. Now your chances to end up winning are really small. But it's statistically possible. Like winning in a lottery.

All you can do is to study, practice and become better at poker. Rest is up to variance.

Hi PeterTee,

I'm mainly an online cash game player so I don't have much experience with live tournaments. If you would have asked about online cash, I would have said that if your winrate is 2bb/100 over 200k hands, you could start to consider yourself a winning player. That is some kind of a rule I have heard a long time ago.

Now, when it comes to tournaments, I believe those are even a bit more variance heavy and you really need to play a lot. As Kyyberi said above, 100 tournaments would be just nothing, like a grain of sand in a desert almost.
Okay I guess your results could give some clues too. If you play just 100 tournaments and manage to final table half of them, maybe you are a decent player

However, if you just started out, my best guess is that you are not yet a profitable player. Poker is a bit difficult game sometimes and it really requires a lot of practice at the tables ( which you won't get much when playing live ) and it takes a lot of studying.

Here are some questions that I think even a slightly winning player should be able to answer:
1) do you have any idea what hands you should be opening pre-flop on each position?
2) do you have a rough idea what hands you should be defending vs raises from different positions?

The answers don't need to be super specific, I just want to make sure you know that the ranges should be a bit different and you have some idea how to play.

3) do you know what pot odds, implied odds and reverse implied odds are?
4) do you have a basic idea about how to size your bets?
5) do you know when you should switch to push or fold strategy?
6) do you know why defending and stealing blinds is very important?

Now, if you can think of an answer to those questions, it is good. But if you have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about, there is a good chance that your results so far are based just on luck and you can't be profitable on the long run because you simply don't know how to play yet
And if you don't know the answers yet, don't worry. Just browse this poker site, read the strategy articles, watch coaching videos and participate in the hand discussions and you will learn a lot.

Thanks for your replies. I think it's definitely a variance thing but I'm also excited to keep learning and playing. When I get a more stable job I'll be able to play 4-5 times a week (and that should definitely increase my chances). Also, La55i I'm fortunate enough to know all of the questions you asked, so that should put me in a good position!

Great I didn't have any idea about your skill level so that is why I asked those. Since you know the answers, there is a decent chance you are a winning player but just need a bigger sample size to confirm that

Your sample of 2 games per week is waaaaaay to small of a sample to make any conclusions as to whether you are a winning player.

That's the problem with live, decent sample size is kind of hard to gather up. Why don't you use that money on lower buy-in tournaments online instead?