Session Simulator

The hardest thing to internalize about poker is how wide the spread really is. A 5 BB/100 winner — a genuinely good live player — still loses money in a large fraction of 500-hand sessions. And that’s the median outcome; the bad sessions are ugly.

This simulator runs a thousand sessions for you in the time it takes to pour a drink. Tweak the win rate, the variance, the session length, and watch the distribution shift. The key insight: the width of the distribution is dominated by variance, not win rate, until you start playing session lengths of several thousand hands.

What to look at

• The histogram — how spread out are the outcomes? Red bars are losing sessions.
• Percentiles — the P5–P95 range is what you’ll actually experience on your extremes. If you can’t stomach the P5, you’re under-rolled or playing too aggressively.
• Loss probability — even a solid winner loses >30% of sessions at realistic variance. That’s normal. Stop taking it personally.

Why this matters for damage control

If you’re playing with a fixed risk budget for the night, the simulator tells you how likely you are to blow through it. Session length is a lever — shorter sessions cap your downside but also cap your upside. Sometimes walking away at +3 BI is the right move not because of “locking in wins” superstition but because the math says your risk of a worse session outcome is too high relative to the expected gain.