Percentage of online players who are profitable

[Dsperz]

Well no matter how you define the terms of this argument I think everyone would agree that online poker has become more difficult to win at. Wtih the government making it difficult for some of us to get money online it has kept a lot of weaker players offline. So I would say no matter how many are winning players there are not as many losers out there as before and the winning players are most likely winning a little less than before.

[PJo336]

i agree totally, hence go PPA

[jogsxyz]

[ QUOTE ]
According to my poker tracker stats which has 537,643 hands for 12,576 different players, 38.82% are winners and 61.18% are losers. This doesn't seem right to me but stats can lie.

I saw an executive for a poker site on TV saying that 80% lose, 20% win. Sounds more realistic to me.

[/ QUOTE ]

While stats don't lie, they often distort. Half million hands, but how many of those players in your sample has over 10,000 hands? Need about 100,000 hands on a player for a good estimate of his winrate.

[arkwon]

At which stakes are these stats pulled from?
These don't sound unreasonable though, I have similar stats for around 200k hands at $25-$200NL. At PL, around 58% are losers. (I don't play cash games and feel this is too small a sample anyway)

[Voltaire]

My PT stats give over 40% as winners in a wide range of LHE cash games from 2/4 to 30/60. Two observations:

(1) Players are much better than a lot of people think. At 2+2 we are used to reading about spectacular stupidity, and the grinders are always disparaging the "donks" because, frankly the difference between somebody who is grinding out 1 BB per hour and somebody who losing 1BB per hour is painfully small, a few mistakes an hour, basically, and the grinders know it and resent the fact that their advantage isn't greater.

(2) The PT stats divide the number of losers by the total number of players. What this doesn't show is the extent of the losing. If you have a hundred players and 60 of them are losers and 40 winners, that doesn't necessary tell you how much the losers lost and the winners won. Some losers lose so much that they would equal the average losses of maybe ten losers.

[alphatmw]

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.

[Jeffmet3]

The rake is the big reason why there are so many more losing players than winning players.

If it was a 0 sum game, the difference in skill levels would probably still have it be between 60-40 and 70-30 in my opinion.

But, the fact of the matter is that most players are roughly break-even players. However, the rake makes all of these players losers.

As far as the actual numbers, I personally think 90-10 is a bit conservative, and that 95-5 is probably more likely.


The majority of poker players play low stakes, or which almost all of them are losing players long-term.

[gull]

95-5 would not surprise me.

Pokertracker databased are biased.

[RobNottsUk]

Sharkscope say something like 33% of SnG players are in profit to.

I've heard figures, passed on from a Poker Site of something like 90% players being losers, but suspect sampling a table may provide a different stat (as winning players are likely to be regulars).

In general, I think players do not pay enough attention to size of rake cap, rake, and the number of seats in FLHE games. The site I played at, and made 10+bb/100, has lifted the rake cap by 6x recently, so the FLHE game cap is double that of the same blinds NLHE game (which is much bigger game)!

[pzhon]

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

[/ QUOTE ]
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.

That 60% of your opponents are losing after so few hands actually indicates that the vast majority are hopeless. It takes a substantial loss rate (about the rake), to be down 60% of the time after a few orbits.