[PokrLikeItsProse]

There is actually a reasonable way to reconcile these two data points.

1) The 20% figure covers cash game players at levels where someone will use PokerTracker. It is quite plausble to suggest that there are a greater percentage of losers playing 0.02/0.04 limit hold em on some site compared to 10/20, but that PT will oversample higher stakes players. Also, the rake effect makes more marginal players losers at lower stakes and there are more low-stakes players than mid- and high-stakes players.

2) Presumably, those PT numbers do not include tournaments. To take one site as an example, PartyPoker seems to pay out to about 10-13% of the field under most cases. What percentage of tournaments-only players do you think end up positive over the course of the year? I would say that somewhere less than 10%.

3) Some players who could be winning players aren't sufficiently bankroll and normal variance causes them to go bust and end up in the red because they can't handle normal swings. For example, a player deposits $100-200 a month and chooses to play 50max or 100max NLHE online at least once a week, unless he is broke. This player will always be in danger of going bust because he isn't properly bankrolled for the level he is playing. Because there always exist some players who will stupidly play above the their bankroll, the number of players who have a natural positive win rate should always be greater than the number of players who are positive over the course of a year.