I think you're confusing poker with the banking system.

ha ha ha - I like the banking comment.

me - I'm a slightly losing player in on-line cash games (I don't bother playing them anymore)
winning on-line SNG's as I find these much easier
and semi-professional winning live cash player over 10BB's per hour with every session recorded over the past 3years (self analysis is one of the best ways to improve I think)

as a guess I would say that less than 10% of players are overall winning players and yes....of course 2+2 will capture a good amount of these winning players - I do think there are a huge chunk of people out there that could be winning players and know how to play poker/done some research/read books/tried to improve but have most likely made themselves marginal losers by not addressing their own leaks (as opposed to being overmatched by their opponents) and not ajusting to their opponents correctly in order to maximise or laydown obvious losing plays eg as previously stated calling huge river raises from the tight passive eg 2 not being able to adjust properly to calling stations I find to be very common

as for live players some people play so infrequently they could be lifetime losers and not even realise (as the occassional win keeps them going and they have a selective memory about their losses)

lol I've turned Literally 0$ (50$ free credit from acg) to $950's and below it all. now $1000 lol

I was a marginal winner online playing small stakes SnG. When that went belly up and I moved to Louisiana, I started playing Limit live at local casinos. Been playing 1-2 times a week for about 2 years. I'm a break-even player at Limit, but about 7 months ago I started playing MTT in that format I'm cashing about 35-40% of the time and I'm up about $3500.

Im a winner..Flawlessbinkage..... Hard to gather max profit on Merge though, tounraments arent deep enough

Pretty big winner live, slight loser online. Never understood the value of HUDs until I'd already stopped playing and then Black Friday happened soon after. PTR has me at a 500 dollar loser over my career. Winner at the smaller stakes up to 100NL where I lost 1000, putting me into the red. -_-

Winner, never deposited lol just some freerolls, BRM and patience

definitely not 30% of poker players are profitable. just open up a few stars tables, randomly look up 10 on PTR and you will find that on average most are losing. and then if you factor in long term results and filter out only those who played 100k + hands, well then it becomes a bit biased because usually only winning players play that many hands, losing players quit after a few thousand hands. and most regs who play millions of hands are rakeback pros who have winrates of like 0.5BB/100

Cool story bro, I'm glad your back of the envelope calculation entirely disproves several well written studies and articles.

I mean seriously... why do people keep coming in and making wild ass guesses when there are several reputable sources with cited data?

That isn't a made up number, it's real data from real huge tracking databases.

I just started playing in July. For the first few months I was definietly a losing player. But ever since this year started I've been tracking my winnings and I'm so far a winning player. Not enough logged hours for hourly rate to matter but I'm up by about a thousand so far this year, mostly from playing $1/2 NLHE.

I am one of those players who do not play higher than they can beat/bankroll; the only way such a player would be a loser is if he is getting beaten by the rake and is willing to take that lose when he is moving up.

120 hours of losing since the start of the year a bump in the road or a losing player? when do i admit im a losing player

I'm a marginal winner at nanostakes on Stars but do much better on 888. Sample size is lolbad though. Only about 75k hands total so far.
I only made one small deposit on each site. Never gone busto yet.

whenever you lose rest of your BR