Looking at the winrates for NLHE, it seems that they are pretty close to what it would take to build a decent 2000bb bankroll for the next level in 100k hands. At 10nl and 25nl the WR is exactly what it would take to win 2000bb for the next level in 100k hands. In other words, filter for players who have played at least 100k hands and you find the players who have played 100k hands and then moved up when they have the proper bankroll.

This is of course only a theory based on the very limited data presented, but it would be interesting to see the figures for those players who have played 50k/200k hands at each level. My guess is that the players with 50k hands will have a significantly higher WR and the player with 200k hands will have a lower WR.

[Edit: was looking at Lord_Crispen's numbers on page 1 where he converted the BB/100 to $/100. Turns out his conversion for 2nl is way off and in fact this winrate at 2nl gives you almost 4000bb for 5nl. But I've heard that 5nl tables at stars are deep, perhaps this could explain this anomaly.]

thanks for this regrinding my roll from $20 on stars at nl2 I havent played in well over a year and I might have to re-evaluate my goal of back to nl25 by end of March, and all I can say is after last sitting at nl2 there is a hell of a lot more grinders at nl2 even though some of them are mass tabling losers according to PTR, also a Chinese man at the tables said the poker factories are coming soon lol

hey thanks for doing this"..... those win rates are shockingly low for top 50 in the world. i realize people move up but it's pretty low at the high ends too.

i figured eventually at all but ultra-micro stakes that the play would eventually succumb to the rake. looks like it has

one thing i think is overlooked is that these are top 50 winners, and what's the world's population? 6 billion or so?..... players with recently active online poker account - 500k to 1MM

could OP give the number of players who qualified for most active game? obviously those numbers for all levels would be better, but i'd be happy with the largest volume one.....

and for argument's sake ( and again just for one level is good), how many more winners and giant winners in particular emerge if you loosen the minimum hand requirement

thanks again, should develop this into 2p2 magazine article

This started just more as a personal interest project that I thought produced some interesting results that would be great to share but I can see that it may be worthwhile to take it further and start breaking things down a bit due to continued interest - HU v 6-max v FR would be the first step as that appears to be of interest and may very well explain the leap in winrates from NL25 to NL50 beyond the obvious rake issues.

To answer a previous question, these numbers were straight from the PTR top winners list, so they are combined HU / 6-max / FR. I imagine that as the FR grinders likely put in the highest volume and achieve the lowest winrates that would push the results to the low side. Having said that, I started using median rather than mean results to stop the bias towards the mass volume players and it did not change the winrates by much.

I used this initial study as a reason to jump from LHE to NLHE and found that the micros in NLHE are beatable for an amount well beyond what is listed here which supports the theory that winning players move up quickly so will not be counted in the results. However this would occur in all 3 games which means if we are comparing game to game then the comparison is still fair. I would also suggest just from personal experience (so I am definitely open to contradictory opinions) that it is much easier to perform significantly better than these numbers in NLHE than it is in LHE. I have dabbled a bit in PLO so cannot provide an educated guess in that regard.

I didn't do any analysis but I did notice towards the end of last year that the PLO results did appear to start to come down a bit which would indicate that the long term in PLO is much much longer than the long term in NLHE or LHE. (the results did remain higher than the equivalent NLHE results).

I don't really play cash games much. But those winrates seem depressingly low to me.

To add to the thread, I think it was in the coach bashing thread in NVG where it was pointed out that there may be only two players on stars who made 100/hour at NL200 last year. I think it was also found (though I'm not 100% on this) that nobody has made 100k at NL50 ever. These are some sobering facts that people need to let sink in before they talk about dedicating their life to poker and "going pro". Yes you can make some decent side money playing but the days of rivers of gold are long gone.

The numbers are even worse than that denks, here is the info from the thread you reference:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29...guyen-1148903/


I agree with your summary, the days of flowing money playing poker are over, at least until we have a mini-boom when US rec players are able to safely play on some future regulated poker sites.

Nice post. GL

denks, well articulated and exactly what i thought of when reading this. people shouldn't be quitting college to go pro.

also womder how many people worldwide make over $100k/year from online cash games. anyone care to guess?

nice that higher end PLO might be highly profitable

also, everyone who dismisses high rake with "you're whining cause you aren't good enough" should be required to read this

Thats just because no decent player stays at these limits

why would you expect to make 100k a year at penny stakes like 50NL? If you want to make a living 100NL is the absolute minimum unless your living in some 3rd world country, even 100NL is pretty low and i would never think about going pro at that limit. beating Nl200 is earliest you can think about it.

/ah i see, 100k microsystem dailyvariance... says it all