[LearnedfromTV]

Everything you say sounds plausible, but

I would argue that there is a big difference between saying

a. 5% of anyone who has ever played a given buyin MTT at a given site are winners

and

b. 5% of a given field are winners

I agree with a. but not b. because the winners play more often, a fact which skews this statistic (% of players who are winning) in general, but probably even more so with respect to tournaments.

I am willing to bet that a lot of bad players who just want to gamble it up every once in a while without much real risk play tournaments way more than they play ring games.

I also speculate that poker tracker databases miss a lot of one deposit and done ring game players, inflating the 40% figure more than you think.

In general, I think looking at Joe 30 hours a week Multitabler and tallying one in the winner column and then looking at a ten guys who put $20 in for the hell of it, lose a couple tourneys, never play again and tallying ten in the loss column, then saying 1 in 11 win, is a bit misleading.

In general, there are way more losers than winners in part because there are way more small losers than small winners, which is even more true in multi table tournaments than ring games or sng's.