ROI in poker — return on investment — measures how much you win relative to what you spend on tournament buy-ins. Binking one Sunday doesn't make you a winner; a positive ROI over hundreds of tournaments does. It's the tournament player's version of a winrate: cash players count bb/100, MTT players count percentage returned on money invested.
The formula, with numbers
ROI = (net profit ÷ total invested) × 100.
Say you play 200 tournaments at $10+$1: that's $2,200 invested. Your total cashes add up to $2,750. Net profit is $550, so your ROI is 550 ÷ 2,200 × 100 = 25%. Every $11 you put in returned $12.50 on average — including every tournament where you cashed nothing.
Two mistakes that inflate everyone's numbers: leaving out the fee (the rake), and forgetting re-entries and add-ons. If you fired three bullets, that tournament cost three buy-ins. Anything else is bookkeeping fiction.
What counts as a good ROI
It depends entirely on the fields you play. Honest benchmarks: at low-stakes online MTTs, a studying player can sustain 10-30%. The 60% screenshots you see on social media are almost always small samples or ultra-soft fields. In large-field events, a sustained 5-10% is already professional-grade work — in a 1,000-runner tournament, over 80% of the field loses their buy-in that day.
The catch: sample size
Most of your tournament profit comes from a handful of final tables, which makes short-term results nearly pure noise. Fifty tournaments tell you nothing, five hundred start to hint, a thousand-plus start to inform. This is variance at its most extreme: you can play well for six months and be down. Hence the house rules — keep 100+ buy-ins for MTTs and grade your decisions, not tonight's cash.
How to actually improve it
- Game selection. Soft fields and slow structures pay better than proving yourself in tough ones. If you're new to MTTs, this one habit outearns any technical fix.
- Endgame study. The money moves on the bubble and at the final table. ICM — the math of what your chips are worth in prize money — is the highest-return study hour available.
- Track everything. A tracker computes your ROI, sample and downswings automatically; our tools page lists the ones we use, sorted by level.
Quick FAQ
Does ROI apply to cash games? No — cash results are measured in bb/100 (winrate), because there's no fixed buy-in to return on. ROI is a tournament and sit & go metric.
Is ROI before or after rake? After, always. The fee is part of your investment, so a $10+$1 tournament counts as $11 spent. Ignoring the fee overstates every result.
Can a winning player have a negative ROI this year? Absolutely. With top-heavy payouts, one missed final table swings entire months. That's why the sample, not the calendar year, is the unit that matters.
The lesson
ROI isn't a bragging stat — it's a long-term thermometer. Calculate it honestly (fees and re-entries included), trust it only with a real sample, and use it to pick better tournaments rather than to punish yourself over a bad week. Tonight's score is noise; the process is the signal.
Do you know your actual ROI, or have you never run the numbers? In our community we compare real stats and review final-table spots every week. Join free.