Report cards for poker...

I used to hate getting report cards when I was in school. Mainly because the report cards generally painted the true picture of how I was doing in school which sometimes (more often than not) was different from the updates I gave my parents. So, they would be expecting A's and B's and my grades were more like B's and C's. Well, now that I'm a grown man and generally, my "report cards" (nowadays called evaluations) tend to affect my paycheck, I am more interested in how I am truly doing. Well, I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately... and unfortunately, there's no standard "evaluation" in poker.

One can always argue that if you are making money, then you are a "good" poker player. But I think as you get better and better, you also know that that's not true. Should the dollar amount of your winnings be the indication of how good you are? Should the knowledge of poker theories make you a better player than someone else? How long and how consistently do you have to make money to be "good"? How good is "good" anyways? These are just some of many questions I have.

On one of the forums I visit relatively frequently, some people post their pokertracker stats. For those that aren't familiar with pokertracker, it's a software that tracks your play, saves all the hand histories, keeps track of stats like how often you see the flop, how often you bet/raise preflop, post flop, and on the turn and on the river, how often you go to showdowns and how often you win those. Well, on this forum, the popular stat that they discuss is BB/100 or BB/hr. BB/100 is the number of big bets won per 100 hands (so if you play 2/4, BB is $4 so if you are at 4.00 for BB/100, that means that on average, you win $16 per 100 hands). BB/hr is generally half of your BB/100 since online, you see about 50-60 hands per hour. But even that becomes debatable. Why? Well, how many hands is a good enough sample? In the month of February, my current BB/hr at a 1-2 NL table is like 40+. Does that mean that if I played 40 hrs a week and played 52 weeks in a year, I would make $166,400??? It would if that is an accruate reading. However, I know that I can't keep up that kind of win rate. Trust me, if I could, I would have already quit my job.

What about the money? I never deposited since 2004 in the FullTilt account (except when I wanted to make use of redeposit bonuses where I would just withdraw and redeposit in order to get the bonus) so does that make me a "good" player? If I make a certain dollar amount, does that make you good? Probably not. Look at Robert Varkonyi. He won the 2001 WSOP (maybe 2002) but he sucks. All the pros would chew him up like lunch meat. So, winning even the WSOP may not make you a "good" player. Which inevitably leads to my ultimate question...

How good is "good"? I guess to an extent, everyone may have their own definition. But I don't know that there is any true answer. I mean we can all agree that the players we always see and recognize on tv are good players right? So what makes them so good vs everyone else? I'd love to hear people's thoughts about this. Do you think you're a good player? How good do you think you are? And most importantly, why and what's your criteria?