$3 billion in rakes

[wins_pot]

From Barron's last week...
04 gross revenues for all las vegas strip casinos=$5bill
04 gross revenues for all internet poker sites =$3bill (they note that this might be low)
this means the bottom line for int poker is prob higher, since margins are clearly high.

guys,this means that we paid $3 bill in rakes last year. that is 30,000*100,000.

with this much taken off the table, there is no way that more than 10% of internet players are LT winners.

as a finance guy, to me it is reminscent of the literature on stock options, which are a zero-sum game (or a negative sum after one accounts for commissions and, often huge, bid-ask spreads). the best studies there suggest that LESS than 10% of active option market participants make money.

$3bill. most of us have made some people very rich, while wasting a lot of our time to make a fairly trivial amount of money (if any).