10% of poker players are winners???

[timprov]

It's pretty pointless on a player-by-player basis. The average winning player is going to take up a lot more volume than the average loser, in any relatively long term.

I'd like to see numbers on what percentage of player-hands are played by winning players.

[RollaJ]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
My poker tracker shows me that 39% are winning and 61% are losers.

[/ QUOTE ]

Haven't you been on here long enough to know that these two datapoints actually support each other?

Your session results will form a bell curve around your long term true win rate, the steepness of which depends on your standard deviation. The peak of the curve coincides with your true win rate.

Now picture this in your mind, put the top of the curve at -3BB/100. Notice that a wide part of the curve is in the black?

[/ QUOTE ]

Its rare, but I admit I am very confused, I havent taken statistics in 8 years, can you explain in layman's terms?

[Rudbaeck]

[ QUOTE ]
Its rare, but I admit I am very confused, I havent taken statistics in 8 years, can you explain in layman's terms?

[/ QUOTE ]

This would be so easy if I could draw for you! Wait, I can!

The purple line is a loser, the black line a winner. But due to the standard deviation people will rarely be observed exactly on their long term win rate. Their observed win rate forms a bell curve around their real win rate. (Real win rate is at the peak.)

How likely you are to observe a certain win rate is governed by the area under the graph. As you can see from my leet MS Paint skills you're quite likely to see a winner lose for 100 hands, or a loser win.

Edit: The Image linking doesn't work. Just click the link to see the awful picture.

[4thstreetpete]

Great article!

[pzhon]

I agree with timprov. The 8% figure is misleading. Many players deposit $100, play for a few hours, lose it all, and quit. Or deposit another $100 three months later and repeat the process. Meanwhile, a few winning players are playing 20k hands per month. The result may be that when you look around the table, 40-80% of your opponents are winning players, much more than the 8% might suggest.

[pzhon]

[ QUOTE ]
My poker tracker shows me that 39% are winning and 61% are losers.

[/ QUOTE ]
This has been discussed many times. Everyone seems to report about 60% losers and 40% winners. However, this is not meaningful. The problem is that your every database includes many players who have played only a few hands (and this will be true even if you have played hundreds of thousands of hands). If you see 100 hands each from players who lose 5 BB +-15 BB/100, about 37% will be misrecorded as winners.

[HavanaBanana]

[ QUOTE ]
False. It's actually less than 10%, according to "Jackpot" Jay Lovinger

[ QUOTE ]
Since there are very few, if any, reliable studies available that demonstrate the percentage of winners -- and big winners -- from among the tens of millions who play the game, you are probably wondering how I "know" this. Well, as it turns out, there is one group that can -- and does -- track this kind of stat, though they are not about to publicize the results. That group consists of online poker site management, two members of which revealed to me at the WSOP that what intuition suggests must be true -- only 8 and 7 percent, respectively, of all players on their sites finish the year in the black. And I'm not talking about deep in the black, either. The vast majority of those winners are not about to give up their day jobs.



[/ QUOTE ]

I think their sample size is quite sufficient too [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

[/ QUOTE ]


Imagine a site where the max you ever could deposit was $1 and the site actually gave it to you for free.

Imagine that the blinds were $1 000 000 - $2 000 000 and you could not cash out before you got $2 000 000.
Imagine that you could buy in to the game for $1.

Your all time winners on the site would be much less than 1%.

Now, Imagine that you are a average poker player in skill, now that means that you would break even except for the rake.

However if you did some game selection and only played players who were worse than yourself you would probably end up a winner putting you in the top 10% or so of players who actually win money playing.


ToT

[scrapperdog]

This 10% number is made up to make the people that loose feel better about themselves and to make the winners feel superior. It is more than 10%.

If you play at a table with 1 bad person the bad person takes care of the rake. That leaves the rest of the players to fight for the rest. And it is pretty rare to play at a table with only 1 bad person. Mt guess would be 75% lose and 25% win. It is my experience that there are not a lot of break even players. You either get it or you dont. I am not that great at poker and I find winning fairly easy... so stop with the 10%.

[stigmata]

[ QUOTE ]
How about this quote from the article:

"I have a proposition bet for anyone interested: You pick who you believe are the 10 best players in the world, and I'll give you even money that none of them makes the final table of the main event by the time the 2012 London Olympics conclude."

Thats a tempting bet, don't you think?

[/ QUOTE ]

Sounds good on paper, but I think he is working on the principle that the WSOP ME is going to become an even bigger joke as we move towards the 2012 olympics.

[HesseJam]

[ QUOTE ]
This 10% number is made up to make the people that loose feel better about themselves and to make the winners feel superior. It is more than 10%.

If you play at a table with 1 bad person the bad person takes care of the rake. That leaves the rest of the players to fight for the rest. And it is pretty rare to play at a table with only 1 bad person. Mt guess would be 75% lose and 25% win. It is my experience that there are not a lot of break even players. You either get it or you dont. I am not that great at poker and I find winning fairly easy... so stop with the 10%.

[/ QUOTE ]

Party collects about 40$ rake at a .5/1 table. If you have 2 2BB/100 players and 2 break even players 6 players have to lose 44$ /100. that means you have 6 players who lose on average more than 7BB/100.