20% of online players win, why do so many say only 10% do???

[MicroBob]

right.


i use a different game in my analogy.

picture a casino with 1000 blackjack players all playing generic basic strategy so they are at roughly a 1-2% disadvantage.
They are all going to continue playing no matter how much they are up or down.

After 10 hands: 500 players are 'up' a little bit and 500 players are down a little bit

After 100 hands: +450, -550 (and some of the 45 winners are up a lot)

After 200 hands: +350, -650
After 500 hands: +250, -750

After 1000 hands: +50, -950

After 3000 hands: +10, -990

You could run the same kind of example in gigantic casino with 1 million blackjack players and get about the same results.
After 10 hands it would appear that the house is just dealing out an almost 50/50 game.


So....if everyone only played 100 hands or so and then left you would be led to believe that 45% of all blackjack players end up winners in the long-run.
but this isn't the case...they were just on the positive side of variance.

After enough trails EVERYONE playing a -EV game will end up losers.


Obviously poker is different in that some players are +EV while others are not.
I just use this to demonstrate the aspect of how it can appear that 45% of the players are actually beating a game when, in fact, it's just due to a small-sample size allowing them to hang-out on the positive side of variance for a little while.