[squiffy]

There is a thread on another forum where a question along these lines has come up. And I am not sure we have properly defined the parameters.

But some speculate that no more than 1-5% of the Party players are long-term winners, whatever that means. Perhaps we could define that as showing any profit over say 50,000 hands. I am not sure what the minimum number of hands would have to be to reliably show that the player is likely to be a long-term winner.

Others say they have poker tracker data over their own 25,000 hands showing that 40% of their opponents are winners. But I cannot believe that the identity and number of your opponents played is consistent long-term. So you are declaring some opponents winners who have only played 100, 200 or 1000 hands against you, which is like comparing apples and some other kind of non-apple fruit, let's say oranges, for the sake of argument.

Does anyone have a reliable guesstimate of the percentage of all party players or who may be profitable.

Initially I thought say 10% to 20% might be an accurate figure.

But then I thought, why wouldn't the graph of all poker players' performance be a normal bell curve, perhaps slightly skewed somehow, to reflect the negative effect of rake.

So perhaps players at the 50th percentile are break even and players above that are profitable.

I just have no idea how to begin calculating this and wonder if anyone has read any realiable approaches.