What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

Does anyone have any idea what the percentage of all poker players, actually win consistently (regardless of the size of winnings)?

2%, 10%, 30%?

Sorry- I'm just interested! [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]

Thanks,
ian

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

define consistently?

All winners in the game win in the long run, but their profit chart looks a lot like a stock market chart - ups and downs, but moving upwards over a long time.

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

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Sorry- I'm just interested!

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You're not forgiven.

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

[ QUOTE ]
define consistently?

All winners in the game win in the long run, but their profit chart looks a lot like a stock market chart - ups and downs, but moving upwards over a long time.

[/ QUOTE ]

Apologies, I realise now I haven't worded this very well.

Let me define 2 generic types of player:

PlayerA) Just knows the rules of holdem and plays for pure fun. Yes he's going to win a few games and lose a few games. Over the course of a year- I assume he's more than likely going to down (amount irrelevent).

Player B) Has done some research, knows some principles, studies the game.
He also will win some games and lose others. But over the course of (say) a year- he is "likely" to be up.

We all know (from reading books and 2+2) that the games can be "beat" with "proper play".

My question was: How many people (as a rough %) online and B&M are playing the game in a manner where they can expect a long term profit?

Or more simply: What percentage of all players have an idea of what they're doing?! [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]

Ian

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

I think I have read and heard that 10% of those who TRY to become winning players succeed. This does not count for the millions of fish.

I have found poker to be like this...

Think of reading a book where it seems a simple story, a good guy, a bad guy, and a simple murder. As you read the book the plot thickens and a conspiracy unravels that involves the government all the way up to the president dealing with alien beings invloved in a galactic war. The plots are complex and twisted only to find in the end there was no abosolate villain except the war itself....

When I started playing poker I thought it was easy, simple, and a get rich quick scheme. Now after 2 years I can't believe how much I know and I SUCK compared to the pros. It takes an unbelievable amount of hard work, discipline, and love of the game to play poker well. I learn amazing new tactics every single month I couldn't conceive of 6 months ago. 30+ books, over 1000 posts, hundreds of dumb questions, learning to control my emotions while understanding the motives of others, and I stil have a lot to learn.

Now think about what percentage of players are profitable. I know I am.

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

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Now think about what percentage of players are profitable. I know I am.

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I appreciate it's going to be a small amount- that was why I was interested if anyone had an idea how small.

Lets' say 50% of all players set off a path to learn to beat the game.

Going with your figure of 10% for the people who are successful- that would mean 5% of all poker players play "properly" to varying degress (enough to make +profit) over the long run. Sound realistic?

R***B*** aside, the losses from those 95% of players go to the 5% of winners. So it would it be fair to say that the VAST MAJORITY of all poker players are losing?

Cheers,
Ian

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

Yes. Otherwise I would not make any money. Takes a lot of skill to be better than break even or get a profit that is reasonable. Even the 1/2 no foldem holdem games at the indians need a certain finese and strategy chance to be profitable. Poker is NOT easy as I hear so many times from young college punks thinking their good.

Live games are softer than online games by far. My experience in Florida is that Full 10/20 is about as difficult at Full 3/6 online BEFORE the TAGs hit the tables several month ago. Now 3/6 is harder than 10/20 live in Florida. Of course I don't know where any of these illegal poker houses are I just hear whispery rumors and 2nd hand information.

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

No .. I do not think, that the percentage of winning players is as low as 5% ... yeah, it makes you feel good, that you have worked hard on your game, and you have learned and struggled and invested a ton of hard work, and now you are beating the game .. but truth is, that it is not that difficult to become a winning player, albeit winnings might just be 20$ a month or so, still you are a winning player

But it is a good question, what percentage of pokerplayers are winning, and how big a percentage are just donating (and these might enjoy themselves immensely even though, they are losing in the long run)

I lost about a 100$ the first month of playing, but soon won it back and now 8 months later I have a plus of 5000$, since I'm no Einstein or natural at this game, I do not believe it to be an uncommon occurence

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

You should take into account that it takes significantly less time for some to learn the same thing as others. Pure work will not make you good - you need talent - an ability to learn very quickly.

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

7 or 8%. Seriously.

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

Im sure I've seen this post at least twice before, maybe someone can dig a thread up. The usual conclusion is about 7-8% but usually suggestions range from 5-10%.

Hope that helps

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

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7 or 8%. Seriously.

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Ya a while back one of the major sites said that 8% of their players were in the black. That doesnt really mean anything since a player who wins $10 a month at the penny tables would be included. I think that the number of players that make $1000+/month is probably somewhere between 3-5%.

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

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I think that the number of players that make $1000+/month is probably somewhere between 3-5%.

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My guess for this would be <1%. It would take a very good, logical, fact-supported argument to get me to believe >1% are making $1000+/mo.

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

About 7-8 percent sounds about right. Just thinking about it informally, if anyone is making a significant amount of money, then there must be a lot of people donating to the pot since I think most losing players don't lose very much (they simply quit playing or move to very low stakes). I do, however, think that 10% of those who try becoming winning players must be too low. It takes nothing more than a tiny amount of common sense and some patience to beat the micro limits. I can't imagine that anybody who wanted to be able to do this wouldn't be able to.

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

Consistent is a sticky word when it comes to poker.

A great player, one who posts big $ wins every single month can easily have a period of days if not weeks of all losing sessions.

Variance is very extreme in hold em.

Over the "long haul" the general accepted number is 10% or so actually win money (this factors in the rake). Without the rake this % would be higher, I've heard about 25%.

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

Hmm ... let us hope, that the remaining 92% do not realize this ... ?? [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]


(Damn 8% sounds low .. kind of scary, why then are all those people playing poker (at least ringgames, tourneys can fun, whether you win or not ... there is the lotto effect, hoping to get lucky one day and win BIG ... Ringgames on the other hand, they just suck you dry in no time, if you do not play well)

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

Where are you playing 10/20 in Florida?

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

I would say 10%. No matter what, once you start to play poker as a beginner you will LOSE. Well there are some lucky people. But each and everyday you play you learn new things. When I first started, I thought I knew alot and I had to pay dearly for it.

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

According to my PT stats, 67% loser, 33% winners....over 100,000 hands. Simply win or lose, doesnt mean there are big winners or big losers.

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

The 7-10% figure is what I have always heard. I was a bit startled/discouraged when I first heard this, but I don't think the news is nearly as bad for a player who is willing to put in the time and learn the game.

First of all, I believe somewhere between 20-40% of the people who play have no interest in learning the game. They just treat it like any other casino game. Second, I think there is a fair percentage of people who would otherwise be winning players if they did a better job of game selection and controlling themselves. I'm talking about things like moving up to quickly or playing higher than you should because your ego won't let you move down. There's also the factor that a lot of poker players tend to be gamblers and that can cause all sorts of problems.

I believe that for a reasonably intelligent person with good discipline and decent logic skills who is smart with game selection and bankroll management it's not that hard to be a winning player. The reason there aren't that many winning players is because people usually fall short in one of these areas.

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

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According to my PT stats, 67% loser, 33% winners....over 100,000 hands. Simply win or lose, doesnt mean there are big winners or big losers.

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Does this take into account the winners who multi-table?

In other words, if you consider that after rake is considered, possibly 47% of players win, and 53% lose. OK, so what about when you realize that the winners are likely 4-tabling, and so four winning hands at a time could all be attributed to 1 human. And the even better players play 6, 8, 10 tables at once. This should help clarify that probably 5% of the players out there are really beating the game up, while another 40% or so are barely in the black, and over 50% are losing, some of which are losing tons.

In other words, lets look at it like this: If $100M is wagered, then lets say $5M is automatically lost to rake, leaving $95M to be paid out. Let's say there are 20 players who each earn $1M 1-tabling. 20 players earn $2M 2-tabling, 10 players earn $3.5M 4-tabling.

That means there are 50 winning players.

The losers would probably be about 60 players each losing up to $2M dollars.

In other words out of 110 players, 10 of those are earning over 1/3 of all the money paid out. It's very top-heavy. While the losers are probably all very similar (slight losers).

These numbers are just total shots in the dark of course, but I hope I made the point that the skillful players are playing (and winning at) multiple tables. One skillful player could take down 4 different pots at 4 different tables against 4 different fish. The money won and lost is equal, but only 1 of the 5 players "won". The other 4 lost.

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

How would we prove it and what would the varaibles be?

Ok then how bout this!
A buck three eighty and change times X divided by the temperature of the water at the tropic of cancer during the winter solstice. <--- Yup, that looks right!

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

This question is impossible to answer because you cannot define the universe of poker players. How about someone who lose and then quit playing? Do you count him? If you treat everyone who has ever played poker as a poker player; then the percentage of winning players is extremely low. I think less than 1%. If you count the poker players who are still playing today (those who do not play anymore not counted), then the percentage of winners is much higher. I would not be surprised if it is over 20%.

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

I'm not sure what data can be exported from PT to Excel (either directly or via database queries), but it might be possible to get a rough idea of the percentage of winning players if we could export # of hands, win rate (or net winnings), and standard deviation. If necessary, we could approximate SD. We could then determine how confident we are that each player is an overall winner pretty easily. By converting that to a percentage likelyhood that each is a winner and averaging this column, we could get an approximate percentage of overall long term winners, I think. It may be necessary to only include players with some minimum number of hands, since we won't be very confident in any results from players without many hands. By that, I mean that if someone has relatively few hands, we may be only 60% sure that they are winners, even if they have a great win rate. I would expect a disproportionate number of players with relatively few hands in most databases. This would tend to cause our estimate to be too high since even the losers (with few hands) will still be 35% likely to be winners, for example. I'm not sure what the hand cutoff should be though. If we require too many hands, we will exclude players who lose quickly and give up, while including players who go on a sustained rush even though they are long-term losers. I doubt this method could provide a very good estimate, but it may be better than just throwing out educated guesses. I don't have the motivation to actually give it a shot. Besides, my database is relatively small. However, if someone else wanted to try it, it should be a fairly quick process and it would be interesting to see the results.

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

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7 or 8%. Seriously.

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Hey jtr, wasnt it you that made a post in another of these threads that assumed 5-10% winners with certain winrates and SD, and then went on to show that at any given time you are going to get the 60/40 split in your PT database? I wonder if you knew were this post was because it really showed how few players are long term winners.

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

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According to my PT stats, 67% loser, 33% winners....over 100,000 hands. Simply win or lose, doesnt mean there are big winners or big losers.

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I don't think that those stats really mean anything. Unless you are playing the same players over and over, most of those winner/loser results are simply the report of how a single player did in a single session.

Those numbers are about what you would expect if 10 people sat down and played for a couple of hours. Given the rake, 3 winners and 7 losers sounds about right for that session.

But that tells us nothing about the long term profit/loss situation for any of those players. The general rule of thumb I've always heard is that a pro expects to lose 1 out of 3 sessions in the long run. PT stats could show 2 or 3 losing sessions for a pro who had a dozen winning sessions over the same period that weren't in that sample.

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

It shouldn't matter if you have consistent stats on individual players, the 'sessions' will average out.

I'd predict most of those 33% most are very marginal winners, while the losers vary from small to huge. The rake eats up a sizable portion of any profits.

Re: What percentage of players \"consistently\" win?
 

Hi, Ian.

Yes that was me. The previous thread can be found here. There's a long discussion of why the figure of around 40% winners (that so many people quote from their PT database) is likely to mislead. Some simple simulations show that everybody's PT numbers are perfectly compatible with the hypothesis that 8% or 10% of people have +EV.

Cheers,
--JTR.