Free Poker Bankroll Tracker: Session Logging, Win-Rate Charts, and ROI
Log every cash game and tournament session, watch profit, ROI, and $/hour update on the fly, and use the by-stake analytics to decide when to move up or down. 100% free, unlimited sessions, works for live and online play.
How the Bankroll Tracker Works
The bankroll tracker is built around a session log instead of a daily ledger. Once you've created a free TryBluff account, the dashboard opens with a Quick Actions panel along the top and a Sessions list below. Adding a session opens a modal that asks for the basics: cash game or tournament, stakes (or tournament name and buy-in tier), date, buy-in amount, cash-out (or tournament prize), hours played, and an optional location and notes field. There's also a small expenses section for travel, food, and accommodation if you want a true net-result number for live sessions.
Once a session is saved, the dashboard recomputes the headline metrics on the fly:
- Total profit — sum of (cash-out − buy-in − expenses) across all sessions in the active filter window.
- ROI — net profit divided by total buy-ins, expressed as a percentage.
- $/hour — net profit divided by total hours played.
- Profit-trend mini-chart — running balance over the recent session window so you can see whether you're trending up or sideways at a glance.
The same dashboard handles both cash and tournament sessions, but the analytics tab keeps the two pools separate so a tournament min-cash doesn't drag down your cash bb/100. New sessions land at the top of the list where you can edit them later if you remember a detail you missed at the table.
Setting Bankroll Goals and Reading the By-Stake Charts
Two tool-specific tips for getting useful output. First, set a clear bankroll goal in the Goals card and let the tracker measure progress against it instead of staring at the daily P/L. A reasonable starting goal is "reach 25 buy-ins at the next stake" — when the bankroll hits that mark and the win rate at the current stake has held positive over a meaningful sample, the dashboard's by-stake breakdown gives you the green light to take a shot. The Goals card supports rolling targets too, so you can re-set the goal automatically whenever you clear it.
Second, the win-rate-by-stake and ROI-over-time charts are most useful when you've logged enough sessions to outrun variance:
- Cash games: bb/100 starts to mean something around 50,000 hands (a few hundred sessions for most live players, fewer for online). Below that the chart is mostly noise.
- Tournaments: ROI needs at least a couple hundred entries before the number stops swinging by 30+ points on a single deep run. A 200% ROI over 30 events is variance, not skill.
- Stake comparisons: the by-stake chart only meaningfully separates two stake levels when you have a real sample at each. A 15 bb/100 figure at $1/$2 over 4,000 hands isn't enough evidence to claim $1/$2 is more profitable than $2/$5 — the confidence interval is too wide.
Until you have that volume, treat the dashboard as a logging discipline tool — it tells you what you played and how you felt about it — and only lean on the numbers for stake-move decisions once the sample is real.
Common Mistakes Using This Dashboard
The biggest one is backfilling old sessions without real timestamps. The session date drives the trend chart and the by-month roll-ups, so dropping six months of sessions in on the same Sunday afternoon collapses your variance picture into a single noisy point. If you must backfill, do it with the actual session dates so the chart still tells the truth.
The second is conflating cash and tournament results in the same view. The dashboard separates them in analytics, but if you log a tournament's $300 prize as a $300 cash session you'll quietly poison both ROI and bb/hour calculations. Pick the right session type up front; the modal makes it a single click.
The third is forgetting to include rake, tips, and travel expenses for live sessions. A "$200 win" before $40 of room rake and tips and a $30 dinner is closer to a $130 win, and the expenses section exists specifically to catch those costs without mangling your headline buy-in number.
The fourth is treating one bad downswing as a stake-move signal. The move-down criteria in the Goals card are designed to fire on bankroll level, not on emotion, so trust the threshold rather than reacting to a single losing weekend. If the threshold says drop down at 15 buy-ins, that rule survives the downswing — your gut feel after a losing session does not.
What ROI Does and Doesn't Tell You
ROI in this dashboard is total net profit divided by total buy-ins, and it's the cleanest single number for tournament players because every entry is a fixed-size investment. For cash games the more honest comparable metric is bb/100 (or $/hour), which the dashboard shows alongside ROI on the analytics tab — cash ROI can be misleading because it's sensitive to how often you reload mid-session.
Neither number tells you whether your win rate is statistically meaningful, only what it has been over the recorded sample. Two players with a 12% tournament ROI over 50 events have wildly different evidence from a player with the same 12% ROI over 800 events. The dashboard shows both numbers because both are useful, but pair the metric with a quick mental check on sample size before you act on it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I track my poker bankroll?
To track your poker bankroll, log each session with key details: date, location, game type, stakes, buy-in amount, cash-out amount, and hours played. TryBluff's bankroll tracker automatically calculates your profit/loss, ROI, and win rate. Add notes about table dynamics or key hands for better session analysis.
What is a good poker win rate?
A good win rate depends on the game format. For cash games, winning players typically achieve 5-10 bb/100 hands at their stakes. For tournaments, a 20% ROI is considered strong, though variance is much higher. MTT players often see 50-100% ROI in smaller fields, while large-field tournaments may yield 10-30% ROI for skilled players.
How much bankroll do I need for poker?
Bankroll requirements vary by game type and risk tolerance. For cash games, maintain 20-30 buy-ins for full-ring games and 30-40 buy-ins for 6-max. Tournament players need 50-100 buy-ins for single-table tournaments and 100-200 buy-ins for multi-table tournaments. More conservative players should use higher multiples to handle variance.
What is ROI in poker?
ROI (Return on Investment) measures your profitability as a percentage of your total buy-ins. Calculate it as: ROI = (Net Profit / Total Buy-ins) x 100. For example, if you invest $1,000 in tournaments and cash out $1,200, your ROI is 20%. ROI helps compare performance across different stake levels and tournament types.
How do I calculate poker profit?
Calculate poker profit by subtracting all costs from total winnings: Profit = Total Cash Outs - (Buy-ins + Rebuys + Add-ons + Rake/Fees). Don't forget to include all expenses like tournament entries, cash game buy-ins, and rake. TryBluff automatically tracks these metrics across all your sessions for accurate profit calculation.
How many sessions do I need before the dashboard's win-rate numbers stabilize?
Win-rate metrics for cash games stay noisy for a long time. As a rough guide, expect roughly 100,000 hands (about 250-400 typical online cash sessions, or several hundred live sessions) before your bb/100 figure converges close to your true rate. With fewer than 30-50 logged sessions the dashboard's win-rate-by-stake chart is mostly variance, not signal — useful for trend direction but not for stake-move decisions. For tournaments the noise is even worse: ROI on a single 200-event sample can swing 30-40 percentage points in either direction. Treat the early numbers as a baseline you're refining over time, not a verdict.
Should I move up in stakes when the dashboard shows I'm winning?
Conservative bankroll guidance is to move up only when you have at least 20-30 buy-ins for the next stake AND a positive win rate over a meaningful sample (~50,000+ hands for cash, 100+ tournaments at the new stake's average buy-in). The dashboard's by-stake breakdown helps with the second condition, but always cross-check the sample size — a 15 bb/100 win rate over 4,000 hands at $1/$2 isn't enough evidence to jump to $2/$5. The standard move-up-or-shot-take rule is to set a stop-loss in advance: if you drop to 15 buy-ins at the new stake, drop back down and rebuild. Logging the shot-take attempts as a separate stake category in the tracker keeps the data clean for review.