Percentage of online players who are profitable

[Big_Ham]

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i'm a winning player over a good amount of hands at 25NL and 50NL but it boggles my mind to think i'm among the top 3% of players.

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There are plenty of players who are good, but losing players. They may have control of every part of their game but bankroll management, for example. This one problem can easily make someone a "losing" player.

In my example of my local group of 50 ... every one of them has skills capable of taking a tournament down (i.e. great skills), but not consistently enough to make them winning players. Online is also a TOTALLY different beast that takes some adjustment to become a winning player.

[johnnyrocket]

many more losers than winners, i'd say 10% in the long run, 3% can strike it nice

[Tarheel]

Here's a better question....

What % of 2p2ers are winners?

[lucky_mf]

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I have similar stats for around 200k hands at $25-$200NL. At PL, around 58% are losers.

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This type of figure always comes up in these discussions (multiple times on this thread), and it is always garbage.

Maybe 40% of players would win if they played 50 hands and then quit. That's what a 200k hand database is showing you when the typical players have only 50 hands. The median hands played by your opponents doesn't change much when you double the size of your database.

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I don't understand why this is irrelevant. The fact is that many players are transitory - they don't play long enough (or enough) to be classified as long-term players. For these players you have to take their wins and losses at face value.

I personally think the breakeven player is somewhere between the 60th and 70th percentile. If you believe that it is much higher (say the 95th percentile) than by implication all the money in the poker economy is going to the top 5% of the players. I don't find this to be credible.

Lucky

[pzhon]

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Maybe 40% of players would win if they played 50 hands and then quit. That's what a 200k hand database is showing you when the typical players have only 50 hands. The median hands played by your opponents doesn't change much when you double the size of your database.

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I don't understand why this is irrelevant. The fact is that many players are transitory - they don't play long enough (or enough) to be classified as long-term players. For these players you have to take their wins and losses at face value.

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Even if you take the unusual position that you want to know how many players are ahead, rather than the usual question of which ones are using a strategy that wins on average, you still don't see anything close to the total amount your opponents have played. A transitory player may play 1000 hands, of which you saw 50. The probability that the player was ahead after 50 hands is still very different from the probability after 1000 hands, particularly since many will play until they lose everything.

The percentage of players who have won at your table is still worthless.

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If you believe that it is much higher (say the 95th percentile) than by implication all the money in the poker economy is going to the top 5% of the players. I don't find this to be credible.

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Does anything more than wishful thinking cause you to disagree with Lee Jones's comments that over 90% of the players on PokerStars lose? Is there any reason to trust your hunches over the actual statistics from PokerStars?

The main winner is the poker site. The vast majority of poker players lose, aren't very interested in learning to play well, and deposit to play at the levels where they lose the money.

[lucky_mf]

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Does anything more than wishful thinking cause you to disagree with Lee Jones's comments that over 90% of the players on PokerStars lose? Is there any reason to trust your hunches over the actual statistics from PokerStars?

The main winner is the poker site. The vast majority of poker players lose, aren't very interested in learning to play well, and deposit to play at the levels where they lose the money.

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I have not seen Lee Jones quoted to this effect. Please direct me to the link where he is quoted.

The fraction of winners and loses seems to hold steady regardless of the size of the database - people with 1 million hand databases have similar fraction of winners and losers to people with 200k hand databases.

Also - wishful thinking? Why do I care? I just don't think my status as a winner puts me at an elite status (top %5). When I sit at a random 6-max table it is pretty common for me to be able to identify one other player that I think is at least competent and capable of breaking even or better.

Lucky

[runout_mick]

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When I sit at a random 6-max table it is pretty common for me to be able to identify one other player that I think is at least competent and capable of breaking even or better.

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I worded this badly, but hopefully you get the general idea:

Yes, there may be 1 or 2 competent winning players at your table. Many of the other players moved up from lower stakes prematurely (a much larger base), even though they were apparent winners, and will lose. Many of the players currently winning at your stakes will also move up and become losers, and so on. The end result of this is that even though your databases show a large % (30-40?) of players winning at your current stakes, most of these players will go on to be losing players.

The end result is that only the best players, practicing the best bankroll management, will be long term winners. The rest will hit the wall that is the "peter principle" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle and keep rising to their level of incompetence and ultimately lose.

Hope this helps.

[lucky_mf]

I just don't buy it, but that's fine.

If the best long-term NL winners are under 10PTBB/100 and breakeven is the 95th percentile, where is all the money going? Put differently, I would expect to see much higher win rates among winning players if 95 percent of the player pool were losers.

Lucky

[afadeyi]

What percentage of the people writing on this thread are winning players? 1%???

[Voltaire]

You got it right, Lucky. I doubt that Lee Jones ever said any such thing, but if he did, he got it wrong.

When you play at sites as most do and just get into the games as fast as possible without regard for "game selection" (since the players move in and out so frequently that the best game now may be the worst in fifteen minutes), what you get is a sampling of players, as you suggest. Some will be winners, some will be losers. If you play enough and your sampling goes to tens of thousands of players, you can be confident that the percentage of winners versus losers is fairly accurate. So what if a player is only in for 50 hands or so? Yes, that will probably be only a small sampling of that player's experience. But clearly you will have samplings from hundreds of such players. Some will have a winning session, some a losing session. It will NOT "even out," but instead will reflect the actual percentage of winning players versus losing players. The numbers for middle level LHE will be around 42% winners and 58% losers in your Poker Tracker stats.

This will not tell you how much the winners won and the losers lost however. For that you have to add up the individual numbers.

In the big games the percentage of losers may even go down, but they may each lose more BB per hour to support the winning players who are dividing up the take.