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

[jtr]

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This is an excellent illustration of the issue at hand here Bob, very nicely done.

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Agreed. Nice one, Bob.

[jman220]

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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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I believe in the long term, less than 1% of players are winners. Consider a multi-tabling pro who plays the 15/30 game. Suppose this player plays 8760 table-hours per year, or one table-year per year. Over the course of a year the house will rake around $800,000 from this table ($100/hr) and the pro will win $250,000 ($30/hr). The rest of the table must lose $1,050,000.

I think a fairly reasonable assumption is that the average losing player loses no more than $5000/yr. If this is correct, it would take over 200 losing players to sustain one pro.

Of course, at any given moment the percentage of winning players is much higher.

Paul

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Someone doesn't have to be a "pro" to be a long term winning player. Just because all pro's must necessarily be winning players (or bust), the majority of winning players do not have to be pros.

[Sniper]

There was a recent discussion on this topic in the Internet Gambling forum...

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...part=&vc=1

Here's a repost of my comments there...

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If you examine all the factors, its fairly easy to see where all these numbers are coming from...

Rough expectation for long term players:
Ring Games - 40% win / 60% Lose
SNG - 20% win / 80% lose
MTT - 5% win / 95% lose

Other factors to account for...


The winning expectation numbers move up a bit when you account for extra $$$ from RB, Bonus, Point programs, Freerolls, etc.


The losing numbers move up alot when you account for the large number of players that try to play and lose their initial deposit and never return.


If you consider the relative number of people that play ring vs tournaments, its not to hard to understand how a casino mgr would be quoted as saying winners are less than 10%, but a ring players PT database shows 40% winners.


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[Cosimo]

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Over the course of a year the house will rake around $800,000 from this table ($100/hr) and the pro will win $250,000 ($30/hr). The rest of the table must lose $1,050,000.

I think a fairly reasonable assumption is that the average losing player loses no more than $5000/yr. If this is correct, it would take over 200 losing players to sustain one pro.

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If there aren't any winning players at all, then there still needs to be 160 losing players (per table) each losing $5000 a year to sustain the rake. Each shark that comes along (assuming that they're actually making $250k a year) needs 40 more losers. If the shark isn't four-tabling for 40 hours a week, the number of needed losers goes down.

Are there four people at each 15/30 table taking down $30/hr? I don't think so; there's probably one or two. Call it two. How many more hands a year does a shark put in than a fish? I think it's on the order of a hundred. The shark puts in 80 table-hours a week; the fish maybe ten, for a few weeks at most.

.13BB comes off the table on each hand. There's eight fish there subsidizing this loss, so they each lose at the rate of 1.6BB/100h. This is the fish-loss-rate required to support two sharks and the house. If the fish buy in for 50-75BB, that's nearly 4000 hands of play before they bust out, or around 60 hours. If they play 10 hours a week, that's 6 weeks. Just to support the house (ignoring the sharks), a fish that buys in for $2000 will last for over a hundred hours. That's a lot of poker to a fish.

For every fish that buys in for $2000 (66BB) and busts out in two agonizing sessions, there's another fish that breaks even for three months -- and an endless supply of fish that think they're winning but spend 6 weeks til the cards finally catch up.

[Rubber Soul]

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Tripdad, this old thread answers your question I think.

Exactly the same sort of question starts off the thread: "Hey, my PT database says 40% of people win, what's up with the 10% estimates I hear about?" About ten posts down I chime in with some statistical and simulation analysis to show exactly why the PT number can be so misleading. Basically it's the dread problem of small sample sizes once again.

Hope you find the older posts useful.


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Thanks for the link... I have seen three poker tracker stats (from friends) with over 250,000 hands each that show winners at around 20%... That is why I started this thread...

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[tripdad]

thanks for all the replies, guys. i appreciate the time you spent explaining and providing links, etc...

cheers!