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

[Guthrie]

As long as I'm in the winning group and the losing group keeps playing, I really don't care what the percentages are.

[Uppercut]

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Also.....

The ESPN article stated that online sites reported only 7 or 8% of their players end up in the red.

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Not to nitpick, but ending up in the red is a BAD thing, i.e., a loss. Winning players end up in the black.

[Snoopy76]

But you did nitpick.....hope that made you feel better. You know what i meant.

I'd say that its pretty clear that while the NUMBER of players who win might be fairly low - between 7 and 14%, the VOLUME of hands played by the winning players is significantly higher than that.

[Webster]

Also - what do you consider a winning player. If a guy plays 500 hands in his lifetime and is in the Black is he a winner? Sure, but is he a winning players? not enough time to tell.

If you look at players with 20,000 or more hands you are still in the 50% area on whether they are winners or losers. Think of ALL the players that put in $200, play 200 hands and never play again after they bust out.

[WhiteWolf]

I think the reason is that we don't have a large sample size for most players in our PT databases. A small sample size means we will see a bigger deviation from the player's actual results, making some losers look like winners and some winners look like losers. Since most players are losers, we will misclassify more long-term losers as winners than the other way around, inflating the winning player percentage in our PT databases.

Here's a simplified scenario that illustrates this (warning, math follows):

I have 1000 players in the database. 90% of the players are long term losers, 10% are long-term winners. However, I only have 1000 hands on each players. Because of my small sample size, there is a 40% chance I will misclassify a long-term loser as a winner, and a 40% chance I will misclassify a long-term winner as a loser. Here are the results I would get:

Classified as Winners =
(.4 x 900 losers) + (.6 * 100 winners) = 360 + 60 =
420 winners, vs the true number of 100.
Classified as Losers =
(.6 x 900 losers) + (.4 * 100 winnners) = 540 + 40 =
580 losers, vs the true number of 900.

[Rubber Soul]

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they said only 7% win... That just doesn't sound right...

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I think 20% is the actual number of those who win.

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if it just doesn't sound right to you and you really THINK that it's more like 20%...well...that's good enough for me. it must really be 20%.

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Because of the several poker tracker stats I have seen that show around 20%... It doesn't matter either way of course, I'm just curious as to what the real number is...

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[intheflatfield]

Yes, this is true, however, for every player that plays at that level there more than enough losing players that continue to play at a losing level just for entertainment value, plus The number of new players at sites are likely to continue to increase at such an rapid level as to make the number hands played by the few people you are referring to statiscally insignificant. I don't have anything concrete in the way of numbers, but I don't think I'm too far off base.

[Cosimo]

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Classified as Winners =
(.4 x 900 losers) + (.6 * 100 winners) = 360 + 60 =
420 winners, vs the true number of 100.
Classified as Losers =
(.6 x 900 losers) + (.4 * 100 winnners) = 540 + 40 =
580 losers, vs the true number of 900.

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Good stuff. I was about to do the same thing.

Further: you'll only see a fraction of the players at your limit. I posit a strong correlation between number of hands played and winnerness; losers don't generally multi-table, they play only a few hours a week, and they might play for a few weeks then give up. Therefore, you'll see a larger fraction of the winners in your DB but a smaller fraction of the losers. Losing players come and go without PT ever picking up a hand on them, but the winners are more likely to stick around and get seen by your database.

[Rubber Soul]

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I think there is another Huge point that is being missed in this ongoing discussion. Namely that the number of hands played by winning players will always be greateer than the number of hands played by losing players. Take the people on this site who have 800,000 hands at 2/4. SInce they are winning they can continue. SOmeone who loses .5bb/100 or slightly less than break even will have busted out their 300 bb bankroll in 60,000 hands meaning that a properly bankrolled slightly losing player will have busted out 13 times over before they play this many hands. Therefore 20% of hands are played by winning players but not 20% of players are winning players. These are 2 very different concepts and it is important to recognize this distinction when trying to understand these numbers.

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Excellent post... Makes perfect sense...
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Also, I should have stated in the beginning I was talking only about cash game players. I truly believe (as others have said) that less then 10% of tournament players are winners...

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