[Orpheus]

I think the claim that it is difficult or impossoble to be a "breakeven" player is over-objectifying the term. I suppose such stark criteria are a natural reaction to a game with so much uncertainty and long term variance.

Beyond a certain point (maybe ±0.5BB/100), any additional "precision" is meaningless arithmetic. What does it mean to call a player with +$0.01 or +$1 after a million hands --or a billion-- "a +EV player"? Even after a trillion hands, they could be -10BB after their next hand. There is nothing magic about "a million hands" that makes it more accurate than "a million and one" and since any player is outnumbered at the table, it is *probable* that a +$1/million player will go negative within 10-20 hands (and will recover later, through a jackpot). Is he REALLY +$1/1,000,000 or -$10/1,000,010? Both are equally accurate.

Given the inherent variance of the game, the boundaries of "knowably breakeven" are certainly at least ±1 pot/lifetime and probably ±1-3 top sessions/lifetime (the player's largest winning or losing sessions are clearly atypical). It's like the probability cloud of the Schreodinger wave equation in quantum mechanics -- in reality, there *is* no single objective value. (or, if you prefer, "No one can even know exactly where they are in their variance 'cycles'.")

Moreover, any player is constantly changing [learning, forgeting, encountering drifts in venue conditions, affected by internal or external life conditions, etc.] Few people ever play a million hands, and those who do will change so much over that time, that their million hand average is probably a LESS accurate than the stats for their last 10K-100K hands -- and every diehard 2+2'er knows that "large but not statistically large" samples in that range is barely enough for a reasonable guess of whether a player near breakeven is slightly above or slightly below zero EV after rake.

Also, EV isn't uniformly distributed, and certain psychological forces, and even wise choices keep players closer to breakeven than they could otherwise be. Less disciplined players may play looser when winning, and tighter when lossing. Dedicated students often take hits to their EV (in BB/100) as they move up in stakes, begin to play smaller edges, or broaden their game range--all of which are +EV in dollars over the long term, but tend to reduce EV until those skills ae mastered. I mean, who cares if moving to a higher level permanently reduces my BB/100 -- I'd rather +1 BB/100 in 5/10 than +100 BB/100 in .01/.02!

Im'not saying that most players aren't strongly and distinctly +EV or -EV, to a high degree of certainty. I'm just saying that defining "a breakeven player" as someone whose profit is "exactly $0" is meaningless.