[starbird]

[ QUOTE ]
It has nothing to do with how well or how poorly anybody plays. The mathematics of the game can't support more winners than that.

[/ QUOTE ]

Others have pointed out that this isn't literally true, but I think it's true in practice, given the current mix of player skills/activity (i.e., who's playing how much).

Suppose you took, oh, say, a thousand new poker players, and trained them up into strong, winning players, and turned them loose on the online poker ecology. What would happen? Well, there would a thousand new winning players. But the games would become less profitable for (almost) everyone else, and some players who had been only small winners would become breakeven players, or small losers. So the overall number of winning players might not change much. (Note: 2+2 is actuallly an example of this.)

So the pool of winning players doesn't change size much over time. What OP's point suggests is that the turnover in that pool is larger than one might otherwise expect. What happens to the winning players? In theory, once you become a winning player, you should be able to remain one until you die, unless you get pushed out of the pool because online poker is getting tougher overall.

In practice, though, a lot of the current winning players just haven't run very bad yet, and rate to be taken out due to inadequate psychological fortitude (or bad bankroll management).