[Zetack]

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Seems like it'd have to be 50%. It's a zero sum game. Winners/losers probably occupy a bell curve where a few lose really really badly, most either lose or win a little, and the good players win a bunch.

The rake effectively shifts that cutoff point a couple standard deviations, giving us the 10% winners we have now.

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I'm very skeptical that this is true, that the number would be close to 50 percent because its a zero sum game without the rake. Its a zero sum game with respect to the money in play, but that says nothing about how that money gets distributed.

For example imagine a table with 10 players playing say 5/10 limit hold em. One player is better than the other players. Each player has a huge bankroll, say $1,000,000 dollars but will never bring another dime to the table. They play every day. Because they have so much money relative to the blinds, they will play long enough to likely minimize or elimate the effect of luck. Eventually the worst players will bust out one by one until only the player who is clearly the best will remain and he will have all the money.

A zero sum game yes, a wide distribution of winners, no.

Now if you take that same game and all the players keep bringing more money, its possible that the second best player will win more from the worse players than he loses to the best player and so still be a winning player. heck, Theorectically one player could be so bad that all nine of the other players make more money from him they lose to the better players. You could have all kinds of distributions in a zero sum game.

How many players would be winners sans rake though, is hard to know, and certainly is not addressed by the zero sum concept. And the bell curve simply means there is likely to be a bunch of players bunched together in terms of skill or results, not necessarily that they are bunched around the break even point.

--Zetack