Online Poker : 75% of loosers
 

I read on a financial review that 75% of all online poker players were loosing money over time. Any comments ?

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I thought it was more. Something like 90%

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Online Poker : 75% of loosers

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So, 25% are 'tighters'... or is there a group in between?

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If you check most people's PT stats, you'll see it's more like 60%, although many "winning" players are either very slightly ahead or breakeven.

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I read it was 90-95%

I bet there's a lot of players who think they're winners, but have put in hundreds before they got any good, and just 'forgot' about all that expense.

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I assume 20% are tighters and 5% big winners. You gotta have some big winners on tournaments and high stakes tables.

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My name is Lock and I'm an online looser. Mostly because of just that reason: much looser online than in the live games where I've been a consistent 2bb winner over the past year (with the records to show it).

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much looser games is your reason for losing?

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I don't care about the rest of the world/players. I'm up, and that's all that matters. However, I'm definitely not a winning player. Isn't poker a beautiful thing?

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Jackpoy Jay wrote a recent article quoting 2 separate online poker room managers saying that 7-8% of online players end the year positive.

There have been several recent threads on this, do a search on the forums.

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Most say there winners bur are not. If you told me your a online winner. I would ask you how much did you make or loose on June 30th 2004. If you could not answer your problay loosing. No records = not winning

Re: Online Poker : 75% of loosers
 

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Jackpoy Jay wrote a recent article quoting 2 separate online poker room managers saying that 7-8% of online players end the year positive.

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These indeed look more like the numbers that I was thinking about.

Re: Online Poker : 75% of loosers
 

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No records = not winning

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Good one. Probably true.

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much looser games is your reason for losing?

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If you cant beat them ... join them.

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Mostly even level of skill + House rake=Likely loss

Seems pretty straightforward to me.

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I read on a financial review that 75% of all online poker players were loosing money over time. Any comments ?

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As most people in this thread have said, that's very generous - it's probably more like 90%. In the short run, it runs more like 60/40, but most of that 40% find a way to lose in the long run.

PS: losers, not loosers [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

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In the short run, it runs more like 60/40, but most of that 40% find a way to lose in the long run.


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The 40/60 numbers come from ring players PT stats... the 7-8% only makes sense once you account for STT and MTT players and other factors.

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In the short run, it runs more like 60/40, but most of that 40% find a way to lose in the long run.


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The 40/60 numbers come from ring players PT stats... the 7-8% only makes sense once you account for STT and MTT players and other factors.

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I think OrangeKing has it right... You will only have a small number of hands on most of the players in your PT database. So you will have some long term losers that went on a short-term win streak and have positive numbers in your db, and you will have some long-term winners who had a short-term bad streak and are losers in your db. Since there are so many more losers than winners, you will misclassify many more losers as winners than the other way around.

Some math to illustrate:
Assume 90% long term losers and 10% long term winners.
Assume, because of small sample size, you misclassify 1/3 of the long-term losers as winners and 1/3 of the long-term winners as losers.
The percentage of players you will classify as winners are:
(.33 * 90%) + (.67 * 10%) = 36.4%
which is suprisingly way off the true number of 10%.

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You will only have a small number of hands on most of the players in your PT database. So you will have some long term losers that went on a short-term win streak and have positive numbers in your db, and you will have some long-term winners who had a short-term bad streak and are losers in your db. Since there are so many more losers than winners, you will misclassify many more losers as winners than the other way around.

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No, do some datamining and you will see for yourself that the 40/60 for ring game players holds up! These numbers, roughly, are consistantly reported by everyone.

Tournament play, where there are very few winners, brings down the aggregate numbers of poker players making an annual profit.

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This sucks, up untill now I thought I was part of the 'elite 10%', and now I find out I'm only part of the 'elite 40%'

My ego is hurting [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

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No, do some datamining and you will see for yourself that the 40/60 for ring game players holds up!

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Interesting, what kind of datamining are you talking about? I would think you would need several thousand or tens of thousands of hands on an opponent before you can classify him as a winner/loser with a high degree of confidence, and I'm fairly sure most PT dbs out there do not have a lot of opponents with this large number of hands. My PT db is pretty small, so I'm just speculating here.

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These numbers, roughly, are consistantly reported by everyone.


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I would expect everyone's db shows the same pattern: Lots of opponents with few hands (and a lower probabilty of correctly classifying as a loser/winner), and a very few opponents with lots of hands (and a higher probability of correctly classifying). Thus I would expect that everyone's db would overestimate the number of long term winners amongst their opponents.

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Tournament play, where there are very few winners, brings down the aggregate numbers of poker players making an annual profit.

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This is a good point....

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I read on a financial review that 75% of all online poker players were loosing money over time. Any comments ?

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I believe the higher estimates. I would guess probably 80% or so are losing players, another 10-15% are about break even, a few percent are winning at a decent rate, and a small percentage or fraction of a percent are winning at a very high rate.

While not positive, I would suspect the results of the top 10% could easily be within the bounds of statistical fluctuation, and not indicative of say, the 98th precentile players being significantly better than say, the 93rd or 94th percentile players. Just an opinion.

IMHO, it is impossible to be ahead in the long term without winning tournaments on a relatively regular basis (e.g., somewhere between 1-4% of total tournaments entered).

I think most players have a hard time getting a Final Table percentage this high, much less bagging the event.

Or put another way, if you buddy tells you he is ahead after 500 tournaments, but at the same time tells you he has yet to win, he has either been very unlucky at a lot of Final Tables, or he is lying his a*s off.

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Most say there winners bur are not. If you told me your a online winner. I would ask you how much did you make or loose on June 30th 2004. If you could not answer your problay loosing. No records = not winning

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This is not necessarily true, I don't keep records, and I have been withdrawing money from from my poker account on a monthly basis, and I haven't deposited in a couple years. I would only be able to tell you how much I made, if I looked at my withdrawals history.

With regards to the % of players that are winning online, I wouldn't be surprised if it is less then 10%. Many winners multi-table and losing players usually don't so that will up the % of people who are winners sitting at any given table.

I am going to guess that at the low limits, maybe 15% of the players at a table are winners, mid-limits maybe 20% and higher limits...around 33%.

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If you check most people's PT stats, you'll see it's more like 60%, although many "winning" players are either very slightly ahead or breakeven.

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As has been posted dozens of times in the past, this is merely an artifact of the low number of hands everyone has on most players in their databases. It has almost nothing to do with how many players actually win over the long run.

I have 12k players in my database. I have about 70k hands. That means the average number of hands I have with each player is at most 70*9/12 ~ 50. I expect the median to be much lower, and I suspect this is typical of most players.

If 100% of my opponents lose 3 BB/100 with a standard deviation of 15 BB/100, they are all losers, but after 50 hands, it is easy for more than 40% to be winning. If the results are normally distributed, 44% would be winning.

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I read on a financial review that 75% of all online poker players were loosing money over time. Any comments ?

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post the link

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my poker tracker stats read (over only 20,000 hands though) 45%winners, 55%losers. so as far as the 75% i can believe it... thinking that it isn't any higher than that. i would imagine that the 25% winners are a mostly made up of small gainers, meaning only 5% of all players could be up a lot.

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Interesting, what kind of datamining are you talking about? I would think you would need several thousand or tens of thousands of hands on an opponent before you can classify him as a winner/loser with a high degree of confidence, and I'm fairly sure most PT dbs out there do not have a lot of opponents with this large number of hands. My PT db is pretty small, so I'm just speculating here.

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Do a search on the forums for datamining threads, there are many. Some people are pulling down 500,000-1 million hands+/month.

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They are pretty loose.

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Jackpoy Jay wrote a recent article quoting 2 separate online poker room managers saying that 7-8% of online players end the year positive.


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What kind of accounting is happening, though? When they say "end the year positive," what exactly are they referring to?

For example, on 01JAN05 I deposit $500 bucks at Paradise and proceed to lose it all over the course of three days. I don't play again, ever. So, at the end of the year, I'm a loser. Are my stats counted in this "end of the year" stat?

I'd say that for players that play steadily over the full course of a year, the stats are higher than 7-8%.

Spellcheck is your friend
 

lol

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I read it was 90-95%

I bet there's a lot of players who think they're winners, but have put in hundreds before they got any good, and just 'forgot' about all that expense.

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Hundreds? How about thousands?

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I thought it was more. Something like 90%

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A couple years or so ago Sklansky posted here that it was 90% for live games and that the reason for this was the amount in rake that the losers had to lose in order for a winning player to make 1BB/hr. Although the total dollar amount of rake is much larger online because of the number of hands played, the rake is usually proportionally less per hand so that might indeed lower the 90% figure to 75%. If the losers multitable though, even the effect of lower rake will accelerate in time, and so the 90% figure might be applicable after all.

maybe
 

I don't know if this is statistically correct, but isn't it common for break even and losing players to have many winning sessions before a very large losing one? So pokertracker people are recording a lot of people having a lot of winning sessions thus recvording them as winners. And the losing sessions happen much more rarely so you are more likely to observe a break-evenish or a marginal losing player win than lose.

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Here's my thoughts which were posted in another thread on this topic...

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If you examine all the factors, its fairly easy to see where all these numbers are coming from...

Rough expectation for long term players:
Ring Games - 40% win / 60% Lose
SNG - 20% win / 80% lose
MTT - 5% win / 95% lose

Other factors to account for...

The winning expectation numbers move up a bit when you account for extra $$$ from RB, Bonus, Point programs, Freerolls, etc.

The losing numbers move up alot when you account for the large number of players that try to play and lose their initial deposit and never return.

If you consider the relative number of people that play ring vs tournaments, its not to hard to understand how a casino mgr would be quoted as saying winners are less than 10%, but a ring players PT database shows 40% winners.


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Re: Online Poker : 75% of loosers
 

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I thought it was more. Something like 90%

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A couple years or so ago Sklansky posted here that it was 90% for live games and that the reason for this was the amount in rake that the losers had to lose in order for a winning player to make 1BB/hr. Although the total dollar amount of rake is much larger online because of the number of hands played, the rake is usually proportionally less per hand so that might indeed lower the 90% figure to 75%. If the losers multitable though, even the effect of lower rake will accelerate in time, and so the 90% figure might be applicable after all.

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I gotta think it's close to 90% also. It would certainly explain why Party/Empire can afford to give away free money to play on their site.

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</font><blockquote><font class="small">Svar till:</font><hr />
I don't care about the rest of the world/players. I'm up, and that's all that matters. However, I'm definitely not a winning player. Isn't poker a beautiful thing?

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Its pretty important, since if 90% is losing players, then its not hard to see that many of them will stop playing.

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Its pretty important, since if 90% is losing players, then its not hard to see that many of them will stop playing.

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This is not necessarily true... there are many reasons why people play poker, other than to make money.

More than 99.9999999%+ of lottery players are losers, I don't see any slowdown in the number of people playing the lottery [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

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It would certainly explain why Party/Empire can afford to give away free money to play on their site.

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Party would actually love 50% winners and 50% losers, because that means fewer people would stop playing and Party would get more rake.

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I think it's like 90% that loses money. But they might mean that 75% of the people playing online are just losers...

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i think it's more.