Re: What percent of onliner poker players are profitable?
I'll explain the seemingly high number of winners in everyones PT database once again. (This should be in the FAQ on right about every forum!)
Let's say you have played 100000 hands and know you win 2BB/100 and have a standard deviation of 16BB/100.
In my database I have 250 hands on you. It's not even 60% certain that you show up as a winner in my database.
To get a 40/60 spread on winners/losers must require something like the average player to be atleast a 3BB/100 loser.
A small homework to grind this idea in. Draw a bell curve, cut it out in two copies. Make a coordinate system on a piece of paper. Place one bell curve so that it has it's base on the horizontal line, and it's peak just to the right of the vertical axis. This is how the distribution over 100 hands looks for a winning player. A ~40% chunk of the curve lies to the left of 0, in the negative.
Take the other curve and place on the same horizontal line, but with it's peak slightly to the left of the vertical axis. This is the distribution of a losing player. Some ~40% of all sets of 100 hands will look winning.
The 40/60 spread doesn't actually require a single honest to god winning player to exist for it to appear in our data.
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