Online winner vs. losers

[PokerPaul]

well, according to my database, i've made some interesting observations, although my sample size only extends for the past 3 months.

According to what i have, which is obviously only limited to players i have played with in that time, the winner loser ratio is as follows:

Winners 59%
Losers 41%

in that time the house had made a rake of just under $10000.

I only play part time.

Considering that, i am VERY surprised that the ratio is like that. I expected there to be way more losers....

Anyone else have a bigger sample to compare to...

[Vehn]

I, too, am stunned by this.

According to everyone that posts here, 99% of online poker players are LTWs.

Most of which started with $50 and now beat the stars 100/200 for 1.23 bb/hour.

[ClunkerDuds]

but Vehn, its true, I did start with $50 and am now, just 2 hours later beating the 100/200 on stars except with a stunning 18.28 BB/hr win rate thanks to my pattern mapping!!!


/sarcasm

[CrackerZack]

its all made up by the amount you lose at 15/30 on party. thanks for taking one for the team.

[Stew]

[ QUOTE ]
I, too, am stunned by this.

According to everyone that posts here, 99% of online poker players are LTWs.

Most of which started with $50 and now beat the stars 100/200 for 1.23 bb/hour.

[/ QUOTE ]

Vehn, I think you have to understand one thing and that is the people who read and post this in this forum on a daily basis are probably deadicated players who probably represent 5% of the online poker playing population, yet represent the top 10% of the skill level of online players. So, it's only natural that this forum would be highly populated with winning players as the posters in this forum are the players that are constantly striving to make their game better and most here probably are winning players.

[gonores]

You're right, but he knows this is a group of mostly elite poker players. That being said, there are some players on this board who say they are winners that I truly do not believe.

My estimates
Players who post here every day: 75-80% winners
Players who post here at least once a week: 50% winners
Players who post rarely but read forum: 40% winners

The game is not as easy as Vehn makes it look...we can't all have multiple, orbiting penii to intimidate our opponents.

[thomastem]

[ QUOTE ]
You're right, but he knows this is a group of mostly elite poker players. That being said, there are some players on this board who say they are winners that I truly do not believe.

My estimates
Players who post here every day: 75-80% winners
Players who post here at least once a week: 50% winners
Players who post rarely but read forum: 40% winners

The game is not as easy as Vehn makes it look...we can't all have multiple, orbiting penii to intimidate our opponents.

[/ QUOTE ]

How did you come up with these numbers and what pot odds are you giving? /images/graemlins/confused.gif

[gonores]

[ QUOTE ]
How did you come up with these numbers

[/ QUOTE ]

Your bison in heat gave me the "at least once a week" number...I had to use a slide rule from there.

[astroglide]

this includes people that you saw only play 2 hands. i would suspect the number of losers is much greater.

fwiw, i have over 96,000 3/6 hands in my db and i have 38.62% winners. i suspect the number of losers to be much greater than even this. many would probably be break-even players, but the rake is crippling them.

[MrDannimal]

I had a 40% winner, 60$ loser split on my 6,000 hands as well.

[Jim Kuhn]

Compared to 1-2 years ago online poker is unreal. I have helped several people set up onling accounts. Many are playing hold em tournies 'just like on tv' and have never played hold em before. I have thought about getting into games with them just because I know the game will be juicy but have never done so.

[nlpro]

Obviously, house will be the biggest winner no matter what.

[elbooneb]

10,000 hands recorded sor far (mostly playing NL 25$)
40.75% winners-2262 players
59.25% losers-3289 players
total rake $5826
average BB/hour: (5.55)

[MicroBob]

my 10k hands. 44/56 winners losers....but i only have players that have 20 or more hands....plus i play .5/1, 1/2 and 2/4.


"we can't all have multiple, orbiting penii to intimidate our opponents."

why can't we??

[Stew]

[ QUOTE ]
You're right, but he knows this is a group of mostly elite poker players. That being said, there are some players on this board who say they are winners that I truly do not believe.

My estimates
Players who post here every day: 75-80% winners
Players who post here at least once a week: 50% winners
Players who post rarely but read forum: 40% winners

The game is not as easy as Vehn makes it look...we can't all have multiple, orbiting penii to intimidate our opponents.

[/ QUOTE ]

I can somewhat agree with this, however, I know of one poster for sure who posted multiples times daily at one point that was definitely NOT a winning player. Additionally, I know of several posters who only make occasional posts maybe once a week to 2-3 per month that are definitely winning players.

So, I agree there is a probable correlation between posting frequency and winning player, but it is certainly not absolute.

[Stew]

[ QUOTE ]
well, according to my database, i've made some interesting observations, although my sample size only extends for the past 3 months.

According to what i have, which is obviously only limited to players i have played with in that time, the winner loser ratio is as follows:

Winners 59%
Losers 41%

in that time the house had made a rake of just under $10000.

I only play part time.

Considering that, i am VERY surprised that the ratio is like that. I expected there to be way more losers....

Anyone else have a bigger sample to compare to...



[/ QUOTE ]

For the record, I have 9678 hands in my data base ranging from .25/.50 up to 2/4 and I am showing 42% winners/58% losers with a minimum of 50 hands played.

[ramjam]

18,306 hands
4,806 players - 41.01% winners; 58.99% losers (although there are about 100 breakeven players - don't know how they feed into these percentages)

[redsimon]

[ QUOTE ]

My estimates
Players who post here every day: 75-80% winners
Players who post here at least once a week: 50% winners
Players who post rarely but read forum: 40% winners



[/ QUOTE ]


So the key to becoming a winning player is post more regularly? /images/graemlins/grin.gif

[Norm]

If losers win 40% of sessions, lose 60%
and winners win 60% of sessions, lose 40%
your figures make sense.

Only players that you have a large sample of hands will show their real performance. Of course most people who play a lot are either winners, rich, or self-deluded.

[Piers]

[ QUOTE ]
Winners

[/ QUOTE ]

I think it is very easy to get confused about what a winner is. Here are five possible definitions.

1) Ahead over a certain number of hands.
2) Have a positive expectation in the games they are playing, so can expect to be ahead in the long run.
3) Finish their playing career with a net plus.
4) Are ahead, and could if they had kept decent evidence give firm evidence that they are beating their game in the long run.
5) Are beating the games by enough to make a decent living and know it.

I believe there is much less correlation between these three sets of players than many people expect. When people say less there 2% of players can win at poker, they likely referring to definition 4 or 5. Your statistics relate to 1.

Further there is a tendency to use the term winners (and losers) in reference to one of these sets, and then continue as if referring to one of the other sets. This is the mistake you appear to be making. Over the number of hands that your opponents results have been gathered (and unfortunately you don’t give enough information to deduce that exactly), the results will be effectively independent of playing strength so your statistics are just making statements about the fluctuation of result’s over an hour or two.


Here is a fairly bold statement but I think fairly safe.

For most poker players the long term exceeds their lifetime.

Lets use $15/30. Consider someone who during his or her life plays once a week for eight hours over twenty years.

They will play 52*8*20 = 8320 hours in total Using 300 as the hourly standard deviation for a 15/30 game, the standard deviation of their hourly rate of this period will be given by

300/(SQR(8320)) = 3.2.

Apply a normal approximation; they will need to beating the game by at least $6.4 per hour to have a 95% chance of finishing their life ahead. But will rally need to be winning by $10 per hour to be completely sure.

So someone who averages one session a week over twenty years will need to be beating the game by a third of a big per hour bet to be confident of finishing their life ahead.

[Senor Choppy]

The problem is the insanely small sample size for each player. I have one Poker Tracker db with 200k hands entered (which apparently is the largest allowable by Access). The largest sample I have for any player other than myself is 4300 hands. There are only 4 people above 3000. Most of the regulars are at 2000. And the vast majority are at 200 or less.

Even at a few thousand hands it's still a crapshoot as to whether or not someone a winning player or losing player would be identified as such (for me this is one day of poker, and I usually end up losing 30% of days I play).

It seems reasonable that because every person's Poker Tracker db shows that approximately 40% of people win and 60% lose, that this confirms these results. But if you pooled all the hand histories together, the number of hands per player would go up, the short term variance would drop, the winners would be more apparent and the losers couldn't "get lucky" by only appearing in a few hours of play in someone's db.

It's a nice statistic to throw around, that only 40% of people on Party can be winning players. I'm sure it would seem like something to shoot for for bad players, that makes the game seem beatable but still challenging. But if I were to guess, the number of +EV players on party is closer to 15% or so. I think online poker, b/c of the lower rake, can support a lot more winning players than b&m. But judging from the play of my oppponents, it's hard to imagine many of them winning.

BTW, I show 38.68% as winning players, 61.32% losing with ~15k people.

[Senor Choppy]

[ QUOTE ]


I think it is very easy to get confused about what a winner is. Here are five possible definitions.


[/ QUOTE ]

I think everyone on 2+2 would agree that a real winner would be a +EV player, and the other option would someone who has won in the past.

[ QUOTE ]

Here is a fairly bold statement but I think fairly safe.

For most poker players the long term exceeds their lifetime.

Lets use $15/30. Consider someone who during his or her life plays once a week for eight hours over twenty years.

They will play 52*8*20 = 8320 hours in total Using 300 as the hourly standard deviation for a 15/30 game, the standard deviation of their hourly rate of this period will be given by

300/(SQR(8320)) = 3.2.

Apply a normal approximation; they will need to beating the game by at least $6.4 per hour to have a 95% chance of finishing their life ahead. But will rally need to be winning by $10 per hour to be completely sure.

So someone who averages one session a week over twenty years will need to be beating the game by a third of a big per hour bet to be confident of finishing their life ahead.

[/ QUOTE ]

8000 table hours may seem like a lot to the casual B&M player, but if you play online as your only source of income, you're probably playing 4-6 tables, and probably playing 5-7 days a weeek. Using 6 tables, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, instead of 8 table hours total for the week you wind up with 240, (30x more play than your example). So instead of it taking 20 years to arrive at 8000 hands, it takes ~8 months.

It might've been something you could never really be confident of when the only option was B&M, but I think online players can be relatively confident of their results in an extremely short period of time.

[gonores]

[ QUOTE ]
So, I agree there is a probable correlation between posting frequency and winning player, but it is certainly not absolute.

[/ QUOTE ]

There almost has to be a correlation. You can only glean so much information from this forum if you don't post, because you are not addressing your specific problems....this is assuming the posts are poker-related and receive serious replies (you don't learn much from talking about barnyard animals or Israel/Palestine or where to get a good steak in Tunica). The amount one posts is probably probably very highly correlated with how introspective one is and how willing he is to accept criticism...both very important in establishing long-term success.

[MicroBob]

"So instead of it taking 20 years to arrive at 8000 hands, it takes ~8 months.

It might've been something you could never really be confident of when the only option was B&M, but I think online players can be relatively confident of their results in an extremely short period of time. "


you probably meant 80k hands....not 8k.
anyway, for someone semi-serious about the game it's not too tough to play 10k/mth.

david ross is playing around 15k+ per week.


without having looked at my stats too closely, i would guess that most of the 40% winners are barely ahead and that many of the 60% losers are WAY behind.

[Vehn]

This topic has been debated to death back when pokerstat was the program of choice, and it was easier to hide players with a small amount of hands. Astroglide or anyone with a large db - hide players under 100 hands and post the results. Then try 500. It goes way down.

[ramjam]

Well, if I filter it down to >=100 hands, I'm left with 158 players and 53% are winners. If I cut it down to >=500 hands, I get one player and 80% winners. Perhaps my own results are skewing the data.

[Senor Choppy]

[ QUOTE ]
you probably meant 80k hands....not 8k.
anyway, for someone semi-serious about the game it's not too tough to play 10k/mth.

david ross is playing around 15k+ per week.

[/ QUOTE ]

oops. 8k hours, not 8k hands.

[goodguy_1]

Hi Vehn: not sure what you are referring to when you say "goes way down".I'm not sure I am following the flow of this discourse here but heres my take:
Obviously the players that play the most hands in your db are more likely to be winners.I've got 10,184 players in my db after 42K hands...40.85% are shown as winners for any number of hands.When I filter that for 100 hand minimum I have only 406 players(only 3.90% of total player db) left-haha ..59.24% are winners.If I filter it further say 400 hands I have only 23 players(2/10's of one percent of totl player db)- 75.86% of them are winners.There are only 2 players outside of me that have played 1K+.This is only using PT for about 1 1/2 -2 full months of play around.I tookj off last 2 weeks or so for vacation/biz issues.

The 40.85% for the total player pool is obviously way off.If it was valid we would play the same players more often.If you look at the marketplace ..the numbers of players that choose to play consistently and do well could be as low as 5% but thats not right because many players do play well they just dont play professionally...play p/t hours for spending money or they dont need to play because the make much more at their main source of income....Microboy said "without having looked at my stats too closely, i would guess that most of the 40% winners are barely ahead and that many of the 60% losers are WAY behind"

I think this is correct..you may need a huge sample to proove it thu.

There are many small winners and big losers.If you forced the whole play db of ~10K to play 100,500,1000 hours ..the rake grinds down all but good-great players hypothetically...surely not over such small samples.Bigger samples fewer winners because of the rake..simple math.The break-even players after samll samples become losers with more hours..the small winners break-even players as the hours total up.Very few players can maintain the required edge to beat games..also consider many players may play well but games may get progressively tougher it deadmoney dries up..alot of players will not get better than they are right now...games need to stay good or get better for them to maintain a solid earn...games/markets are seldom so static..the environments always changing..with booms and busts any player better be aware of this IF you play as sole source of income...

I'm no math freak but my guestimates are that only 5%-25% of all players would be winners after playing a decent amount of time online...what's a decent amount of time....5K-10K-15k hadns equivalent to 100-250 hours of play.PT db doesnt paint the true picture..Its the amount of money won/loss not #winners/losers..there are very few big winners as %of db,most are small winners,break-even types and small and big losers.
The rake will grind down most players.And dont say the rake is lower online we know that but also online games are 71% faster than B&M games and thats just full tables..The increase in speed means more rake for the all players...which at most limits are losing players over time...this shifts as you move up in stakes obviously..better players excel with more hph and cant beat the incessant rake machine. Unless a commensurate increase in skill has taken place with increased rake collection..you gonna get chopped up even faster online than B&M.
just my 2 cents.These 40% even 30% numbers just dont jibe with reality..