Here are a whole lot more statistics:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/15...layers-221183/

Thread is genuinely funny for how repeatedly BartJ385 is proven to be wrong and his reactions.

Oh god, that thread. I had pretty much washed it from my mind.

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If you are winners, you are close to 95% percentile crowd... congrats, this is as per Alan Schoonmaker, in "Poker Players are different" Chapter 1 2009. You are in 97% percentile as per my estimate and other data ... see below

When I review the links cited by you two and other work, I came up with an EDUCATED GUESS 1) that less than 10% or so are winners and 2) such data does not account for factors as expenses, loss in earning because one person is playing poker and higher taxes as SE tax are paid by poker players

I made an estimate with this scenario: a MTT tourney of 150 players with $11 (10+1) buy in and typical blind and payment schedules of online games, I estimated that 1) less than 5% will be long term winners and much less than 5% will be winners if you assign say $ 10/hr or so as earning lost for poker playing.

I did that because I wanted to check Alan's data...

I found that they are close to truth and in reality, more than 95% will lose in MTT because of the way winners are paid in industry.

The data will depend on type of game you play but MTT provide most favorable ROI

CONGRATS again.

because as Alan says, (winning) Poker Players are different.... they are ruthlessly meritorious....

Yes. Alan is a psychologist like me. I like most of what he says. I haven't read his latest book though. However, we have disagreed at times as well. If he says that only 5% of poker players are winners, we disagree again. It just isn't true. I know players that are definitely worse than me (i.e. they make what I and most other winners consider to be huge mistakes frequently) yet they still manage to do better than break even over a sizeable samples.

Furthermore, it is ridiculous to say that you are only a winning player if you make over $10 an hour (i.e. include the cost of time in playing). This is not an exercise in some economics class. If you want to include the time-cost of playing you should include the added psychological benefits many people receive by playing poker (i.e. many people actually enjoy it too!). How much is that worth? I'd venture that people would pay more than $10 an hour for enjoyment.

The question is are they doing better than break-even. That's it. They available data clearly show that the number of persons doing this is greater than 5%.

As another note, what are you talking about with "your" estimates. As far as anyone reading your post can tell you just made up numbers. You say you used "educated guesses" and "estimates" but provide no basis for such guesses or estimates. Where did these numbers come from? Show your math if you want to dispute what the actual data say.

I imagine the numbers for live and online games would vary considerably based on the different structures of the game, and as well the numbers must differ a lot whether one takes into account VIP benefits/rakeback in the equations ( I am not sure if any of those links do that).

That said, the other guy is clearly just making stuff up to the best of his ability, but that is not too rare in this industry. The TV show "Cheers" created a character (Cliff Clavin) who was basically the living embodiment of that behavior.

Anyone with HEM can look at collated stats for all players in their database and find out that between 20 and 30% are making a profit, depending on site/rake/game etc. If 95% of players were losers, the game would die.

The retards saying 5% of poker players are winners are flat out wrong.

This post: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...0&postcount=50

Shows if there was literally no skill in Limit Hold'em, 16% of players would be net winners after 10k hands by pure luck alone, even after rake is deducted.

In No Limit it would be considerably higher than that in a game with all players having the same skill level.

The simulation below uses a winrate of -2bb/100 to represent rake, and SD of 80bb/100 (typical for NLHE). You can see that in 10K hands something like 40% would be net winners by luck alone. Disproportionately skilled players (above the table average) would decrease that proportion of winners, not increase it.



And here's another simulation using -4bb/100 for the rake, showing about a third net winners after 10K hands.



Rake at low stakes where the cap is rarely hit runs 3-4 bb/100. At higher stakes it drops quickly to a lower level because it gets capped more often.

It takes a lot more than 10K hands for rake to reduce the number of luck-only winners in a game with all equal-skilled players.

I did some further simulations and also calculated it, and I find that with rake taking -3bb/100 in a game of equally skilled players (breakeven game if no rake) and 80bb/100 standard deviation, it takes about 400,000 hands before 99% of players are net losers due to rake. At 100K hands we still have about 12-13% net winners. At 50K hands it's almost a third of players are net winners.

Conclusion:

It is very unlikely that the number of long term winners in poker is less than 5%.

But all of this reminds me of an essay written by Mason years ago. In it he talked about how at a high stakes game, one huge fish can make 7-9 other players profitable (i.e. in this case I mean enough to make a living). He was talking about limit hold'em as I recall, but it makes total sense to me. In a high stakes game where there is a cap on the rake, the 7-9 good players won't net much against each other (surely some of them are the very best and even have an edge on each other, but it is small). But they will all "share" so much profit from the big fish that the game is profitable for everyone. If we expand such a scenario to the entire world of poker, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to expect that anywhere between 30-50% of players could be winners.

The Omaha DoNs while they lasted on Stars generally had 6-8 regs in each one and all were making money, the best ones 12-16% ROI, and the weaker ones at around 2-3% ROI before any VIP benefits on Stars.

The 2-4 fish in each one long term paid everybody.

That game type was probably a bit of an extreme example, but when an extreme donk sits in a 9 man sit and go he basically is paying everybody's rake at the least.

The flip side to this would be games that are basically SNE grinder games. The NL $104 DoNs for instance typically had 9.8 regs in each one (once in a while a random guy would be in one), and these games were completely unstakeable and unplayable unless you were going for SNE as nobody had any real edge. Nobody could be much of a long term winning player in those without the VIP benefits.

While the data can vary from game type and even poker room (Stars VIP program encourages more non edge reg filled games), I have no idea why these guys cling to this overall 5% number which is clearly fictional. I assume it is so they can feel better about their losing in general.

It is so they can say, "We are the 95%"

Kinda reminds me of AMEC0404 repeatedly bragging about being in the top 99% of poker players.

Black Friday saved that guy a lot of money.

Are you talking about everyone who has played, or everyone who is active (lets say plays every week)?

Because you cant possible mean that 30-50% of EVERYONE are winners?

And your theory for reaching this number is really strange. A super fish who is -50% ROI (very rare today) will on average be close to only covering the rake of the remaining equally skilled players. So even with such a big fish, such games will long term create only losers before rakeback.