Strategy

ROI and ITM in Poker: What They Mean, What Numbers Are Good and How to Calculate Them (2026)

Two numbers follow every tournament player around: ROI, how much you earn per buy-in, and ITM, how often you cash. Both are easy to calculate and easy to misread — a 40% ROI over 200 tournaments is noise, and a 25% ITM can belong to a losing player. This article gives the formulas, realistic ranges by stakes, the sample sizes that make the numbers trustworthy, and the link between ROI, variance and the bankroll you need.

Updated: 23 October 2026

Key takeaways

ROI (return on investment) = profit ÷ total buy-ins × 100%. A 10% ROI means you earn $1 per $10 of entries on average.
ITM (in the money) = tournaments cashed ÷ tournaments played × 100%. Typical values are 12–20% because most payouts cover 10–20% of the field.
ITM without ROI means little: min-cashing every time can still lose money to rake. ROI is the number that pays the bills.
ROI needs a sample: a few hundred tournaments say almost nothing, a few thousand start to. Check with our variance calculator.
Rakeback goes straight into ROI: 30–50% rakeback in club apps can add 3–5 percentage points at typical tournament rake. Your ROI decides how many buy-ins of bankroll you need — see the bankroll calculator.

ROIprofit ÷ buy-ins × 100%

12–20%typical ITM in large-field MTTs

1 000+tournaments before ROI starts to mean something

+3–5 ppROI added by 30–50% rakeback

ROI: the number that matters

ROI is your profit as a share of what you paid to play. Take all your tournament results, subtract all buy-ins (including fees), divide by the buy-ins, multiply by 100.

Example. 500 tournaments at $11 ($10 + $1 fee) = $5,500 in entries. Total cashes $6,325. Profit $825. ROI = 825 ÷ 5,500 × 100 = 15%.

Buy-ins must include the fee (the rake the room or club takes from each entry), re-entries and add-ons — anything you paid. Cashes include bounties and any ticket you later used. If you count only the first entry and forget re-entries, your ROI will look better than it is.

ABI and why ROI is compared within a stake

ABI (average buy-in) is total entries divided by the number of tournaments. ROI only makes sense next to it: 15% at a $5 ABI and 15% at a $100 ABI are very different achievements, because fields get tougher as stakes rise.

Stakes (ABI)	Solid regular	Strong regular	Comment
Micro ($1–5)	15–30%	30%+	Softest fields, highest rake in % of buy-in
Low ($5–30)	10–20%	20–35%	The bulk of online MTT grinders
Mid ($30–100)	5–15%	15–25%	Regulars dominate, edges shrink
High ($100+)	0–10%	10–20%	Any positive ROI over a big sample is excellent

These are long-run ranges from tracking sites and player databases, not promises. Club-app fields are usually softer than the big rooms at the same buy-in, which is why many regulars moved there — see our guide to low-stakes apps.

ITM: how often you cash, and why it is not enough

ITM is the share of tournaments where you finished in the paid places. If 100 out of 600 tournaments cashed, ITM = 16.7%. Most tournaments pay 10–20% of the field, so a player’s ITM sits around that number: a tight player a little higher, an aggressive one a little lower.

What ITM tells youWhether you survive to the money consistently and roughly how tight your style is. A sudden drop in ITM over a large sample is worth a look.

What it hidesWhere you finish. Ten min-cashes earn less than one final table. A 25% ITM built from min-cashes can go with a negative ROI once fees are counted.

Tournament payouts are top-heavy: the winner often takes 15–20% of the prize pool, a min-cash returns 1.5–2 buy-ins. Profit comes from deep runs, so ROI depends far more on how often you reach the final tables than on ITM. Two players with the same ITM can have ROIs of −5% and +25%.

How many tournaments before you can trust the number

Tournament variance is brutal. A player with a true 20% ROI can finish a 500-tournament stretch at −20% or at +60% and both are ordinary outcomes. The reason is the payout shape: a few big scores carry the result, and whether they land in this sample or the next is luck.

Tournaments played	What your observed ROI tells you
100–300	Almost nothing — swings of ±50 pp are routine
1 000	A rough idea of the sign; still ±20 pp uncertainty at typical field sizes
3 000–5 000	Reasonably reliable for small and mid fields; large fields need more
10 000+	Trustworthy for most formats

Large fields (thousands of entrants) stretch all of this, because a single win is a huge share of the result. Small fields, SNGs and spins converge much faster. Our MTT variance calculator simulates your exact format: give it ABI, field size, assumed ROI and the number of tournaments, and it shows how often a winning player ends such a stretch in the red.

What changes your ROI

Rake

Fees of 8–12% of the buy-in are common in online MTTs. Rake is subtracted before ROI, so a player who breaks even against the field loses the fee: at 10% rake their ROI is −9%. Every point of rake you avoid is a point of ROI.

Rakeback

Club apps return part of the rake as rakeback — commonly 30–50%, sometimes more through unions and agents. At a 10% fee, 40% rakeback adds 4 percentage points to ROI; a break-even player becomes a winner. Compare clubs by rakeback in our club catalog.

Format

Bounty tournaments move money into knockouts: ROI often looks higher because bounties are collected along the way, and variance is lower. Turbo and hyper structures cut the edge of skilled players and raise variance. Satellites pay in tickets, so count the ticket at its buy-in value. Our Ocean KO and Speed Racer calculators price bounties in chips and big blinds.

Field and time of day

ROI is a property of you and the field. Weekend evenings and holiday series bring recreational players; weekday afternoons are reg-heavy. Club-app tournaments with a home-game feel are usually the softest.

ROI and bankroll

ROI sets how many buy-ins you need to survive the swings. The lower the ROI and the bigger the fields, the more buy-ins. Common guidelines for online MTTs:

Your ROI	Small fields (≤ 200)	Large fields (1 000+)
5%	150–200 buy-ins	500+ buy-ins
15%	80–120 buy-ins	200–300 buy-ins
30%	50–80 buy-ins	100–150 buy-ins

These are rough bands; the bankroll calculator turns your own winrate and standard deviation into a risk of ruin and recommends stakes. If a downswing makes you move down, that is the system working, not a failure.

Tracking ROI and ITM in club apps

Rooms show lifetime results in their clients or through trackers. Club apps are thinner: ClubGG has PokerCraft with results by period, PPPoker and PokerBros show history per club but no ROI. The simplest reliable method is a spreadsheet: date, tournament, buy-in with fee, re-entries, cash, bounties — and formulas for ROI and ITM at the bottom. Fill it after every session; memory flatters everyone.

Step 1Logevery entry and cash

Step 2ROI & ITMformulas by stake

Step 3Varianceis the sample enough?

Step 4Bankrollbuy-ins for your ROI

Step 5Move upwhen both allow

From a results log to the decision to move up

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PPPoker 1.0 · 1

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