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

Rubber Soul · #1 07-28-2005, 11:23 PM

I am curious as to why so many people have been saying that only 10% of all players win (online). I have seen several published reports from poker tracker stats that state about 20% of all online players are winners... Now, there may be only 5% who win big, but I think 20% is the actual number of those who win... Some reporter at ESPN claimed he talked to poker site operators off the record at the WSOP and they said only 7% win... That just doesn't sound right...

Paul2432 · #2 07-28-2005, 11:42 PM

Using poker tracker to determine the percentage of winning players can lead to sampling errors.

I have always heard 5-10% of players are winners.

Paul

jman220 · #3 07-29-2005, 12:37 AM

Why would the poker sites lie to the ESPN reporter? If anything they would want to exaggerate how many winners there are, not downplay it. And pokertracker is not a reliable indicia of how many players are winners.

eric5148 · #4 07-29-2005, 01:06 AM

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Why would the poker sites lie to the ESPN reporter? If anything they would want to exaggerate how many winners there are, not downplay it.

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True, but they would also not be counting rakeback and bonuses.

iluzion · #5 07-29-2005, 02:14 AM

[ QUOTE ]
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Why would the poker sites lie to the ESPN reporter? If anything they would want to exaggerate how many winners there are, not downplay it.

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True, but they would also not be counting rakeback and bonuses.

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Well, hes comparing the said number to PT stats, which also wouldn't include these numbers.

dealer_toe · #6 07-29-2005, 03:00 AM

It might even be lower than the 10% reported. That doesn't account for a winning player having accounts at multiple sites. So its actually lower.

MicroBob · #7 07-29-2005, 03:38 AM

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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%.

PokrLikeItsProse · #8 07-29-2005, 05:38 AM

There is actually a reasonable way to reconcile these two data points.

1) The 20% figure covers cash game players at levels where someone will use PokerTracker. It is quite plausble to suggest that there are a greater percentage of losers playing 0.02/0.04 limit hold em on some site compared to 10/20, but that PT will oversample higher stakes players. Also, the rake effect makes more marginal players losers at lower stakes and there are more low-stakes players than mid- and high-stakes players.

2) Presumably, those PT numbers do not include tournaments. To take one site as an example, PartyPoker seems to pay out to about 10-13% of the field under most cases. What percentage of tournaments-only players do you think end up positive over the course of the year? I would say that somewhere less than 10%.

3) Some players who could be winning players aren't sufficiently bankroll and normal variance causes them to go bust and end up in the red because they can't handle normal swings. For example, a player deposits $100-200 a month and chooses to play 50max or 100max NLHE online at least once a week, unless he is broke. This player will always be in danger of going bust because he isn't properly bankrolled for the level he is playing. Because there always exist some players who will stupidly play above the their bankroll, the number of players who have a natural positive win rate should always be greater than the number of players who are positive over the course of a year.

stone_7 · #9 07-29-2005, 09:49 AM

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.

Snoopy76 · #10 07-29-2005, 09:54 AM

Also.....

The ESPN article stated that online sites reported only 7 or 8% of their players end up in the red. I would say that close to 50% of the people who play online are people who 'give it a try' deposit 20 bucks..lose it all and never come back. Based on that logic, of players who play regularly, about 14-16% are winners. Not a scientific theory, just a thought.