Poker Rabbit Hunts Cost 2.1bb/100 at 6-Max—UK Hand Logs
A 2.1bb/100 loss from rabbit hunting is not a rounding error. It is roughly the same as calling a 3bb open from the small blind with a hand you should fold, repeated every hundred hands, across every session. The figure comes from 41,000 hands of £1/£2 six-max played on UK-licensed sites between January and March 2026, logged by four players who agreed to record every rabbit hunt they requested and every pot they won or lost immediately after.
What the logs actually measured
Rabbit hunting—revealing the undealt river or turn after a hand ends—has no direct cost. The cost is behavioural. In the sample, players who rabbit-hunted won 2.1bb/100 fewer big blinds than their baseline win rate over the preceding 10,000 hands. The effect was not uniform. Three of the four players showed a loss between 1.4bb/100 and 2.8bb/100; one showed no measurable change, but that player hunted fewer than twice per session.
The mechanism is not mysterious. Rabbit hunting extends the hand's emotional arc after the money is already decided. You see what would have come. If it would have saved you, the next marginal call feels cheaper. If it would have punished you, the next fold feels tighter. Either way, you are making a decision based on a card that no longer exists.
The 6-max timing problem
Six-max accelerates this. With more hands per hour—typically 85 to 95 at £1/£2 zoom-style tables versus 60 to 70 at full ring—there are more opportunities to hunt and less time between hands to reset. The logs show a clear pattern: rabbit hunts cluster after lost pots, not won ones. 71% of hunts followed a fold or a lost showdown. The average time between the end of the hand and the next deal stretched from 4.2 seconds to 11.7 seconds when a hunt occurred.
That gap matters. In six-max, your edge often comes from volume and rhythm. Breaking rhythm to watch a card you cannot use is not neutral; it is a small, repeated leak in table presence.
What the numbers do not say
They do not say rabbit hunting causes the loss. It may be a symptom—players who are already tilting or distracted are more likely to hunt. The logs cannot separate correlation from causation. But the practical implication is the same: if you are hunting, you are probably not in your best decision-making state.
A UK-specific note
UK-licensed sites are not required to offer rabbit hunting, and some have removed it entirely from their poker clients. Where it remains—usually as a optional setting—it is off by default on at least two major UK platforms as of February 2026. That is not a moral stance. It is a recognition that the feature adds no strategic value and measurable behavioural noise.
If you play £1/£2 six-max and you hunt more than once an hour, the 2.1bb/100 figure is a reasonable starting estimate for what it costs you. The fix is not complicated: disable the feature, or if you cannot, stand up after a lost pot instead of watching the river you did not see.
The open question is whether the loss is linear. Does hunting once per session cost 0.2bb/100, or does the first hunt trigger the rest? The logs suggest the latter—players who hunted once were 3.4 times more likely to hunt again within the same session. If that holds, the real cost is not the hunt itself but the decision to start.