What percentage of players "consistently" win?

The 7-10% figure is what I have always heard. I was a bit startled/discouraged when I first heard this, but I don't think the news is nearly as bad for a player who is willing to put in the time and learn the game.

First of all, I believe somewhere between 20-40% of the people who play have no interest in learning the game. They just treat it like any other casino game. Second, I think there is a fair percentage of people who would otherwise be winning players if they did a better job of game selection and controlling themselves. I'm talking about things like moving up to quickly or playing higher than you should because your ego won't let you move down. There's also the factor that a lot of poker players tend to be gamblers and that can cause all sorts of problems.

I believe that for a reasonably intelligent person with good discipline and decent logic skills who is smart with game selection and bankroll management it's not that hard to be a winning player. The reason there aren't that many winning players is because people usually fall short in one of these areas.

[shutupndeal]

How would we prove it and what would the varaibles be?

Ok then how bout this!
A buck three eighty and change times X divided by the temperature of the water at the tropic of cancer during the winter solstice. <--- Yup, that looks right!

[bilyin]

This question is impossible to answer because you cannot define the universe of poker players. How about someone who lose and then quit playing? Do you count him? If you treat everyone who has ever played poker as a poker player; then the percentage of winning players is extremely low. I think less than 1%. If you count the poker players who are still playing today (those who do not play anymore not counted), then the percentage of winners is much higher. I would not be surprised if it is over 20%.

[Nomad84]

I'm not sure what data can be exported from PT to Excel (either directly or via database queries), but it might be possible to get a rough idea of the percentage of winning players if we could export # of hands, win rate (or net winnings), and standard deviation. If necessary, we could approximate SD. We could then determine how confident we are that each player is an overall winner pretty easily. By converting that to a percentage likelyhood that each is a winner and averaging this column, we could get an approximate percentage of overall long term winners, I think. It may be necessary to only include players with some minimum number of hands, since we won't be very confident in any results from players without many hands. By that, I mean that if someone has relatively few hands, we may be only 60% sure that they are winners, even if they have a great win rate. I would expect a disproportionate number of players with relatively few hands in most databases. This would tend to cause our estimate to be too high since even the losers (with few hands) will still be 35% likely to be winners, for example. I'm not sure what the hand cutoff should be though. If we require too many hands, we will exclude players who lose quickly and give up, while including players who go on a sustained rush even though they are long-term losers. I doubt this method could provide a very good estimate, but it may be better than just throwing out educated guesses. I don't have the motivation to actually give it a shot. Besides, my database is relatively small. However, if someone else wanted to try it, it should be a fairly quick process and it would be interesting to see the results.