[Cosimo]

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Over the course of a year the house will rake around $800,000 from this table ($100/hr) and the pro will win $250,000 ($30/hr). The rest of the table must lose $1,050,000.

I think a fairly reasonable assumption is that the average losing player loses no more than $5000/yr. If this is correct, it would take over 200 losing players to sustain one pro.

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If there aren't any winning players at all, then there still needs to be 160 losing players (per table) each losing $5000 a year to sustain the rake. Each shark that comes along (assuming that they're actually making $250k a year) needs 40 more losers. If the shark isn't four-tabling for 40 hours a week, the number of needed losers goes down.

Are there four people at each 15/30 table taking down $30/hr? I don't think so; there's probably one or two. Call it two. How many more hands a year does a shark put in than a fish? I think it's on the order of a hundred. The shark puts in 80 table-hours a week; the fish maybe ten, for a few weeks at most.

.13BB comes off the table on each hand. There's eight fish there subsidizing this loss, so they each lose at the rate of 1.6BB/100h. This is the fish-loss-rate required to support two sharks and the house. If the fish buy in for 50-75BB, that's nearly 4000 hands of play before they bust out, or around 60 hours. If they play 10 hours a week, that's 6 weeks. Just to support the house (ignoring the sharks), a fish that buys in for $2000 will last for over a hundred hours. That's a lot of poker to a fish.

For every fish that buys in for $2000 (66BB) and busts out in two agonizing sessions, there's another fish that breaks even for three months -- and an endless supply of fish that think they're winning but spend 6 weeks til the cards finally catch up.