"Finally, we added players’ subsequent lifetime earnings to the scatter. Dots in which the players had the largest rest-of-lifetime losses are big, and dots in which players had the highest rest-of-lifetime earnings are small."

we are not looking at 100 hands. We are looking in the charts at the entire lifetime of players. we can also see how many player are losing vs winning.

Obviously that is on average or do you really want to claim ALL initial winners end up being losers?


Bigfish has great ideas IMO;

I decided to make a thread where this isn't of topic.

What I find really crazy in these charts

1. Players who play many hands win.

2. Losers don't play much

Promotions today are geared all at the players who play many hands. So today promotions are made for the winners.

It seems pretty straight forward and common sense, but because sites only care about # hands today existing business models seem quite self destructive which seems the reason for the decline.

If I understand correctly proven winner means 50k hands and winner in this article.

I would assume that only few players play that many hands overall and thus the numbers should be a little worse than reality.



HOLY $$$$$ I would like to see that number/report. This also means that 100% of the revenue eventually ends up in the pockets of the site?

This makes sense in France, I cant imagine that to be true ROW.

You have any idea to get to it? I'm guessing this is a dumb questions, but where did you read that?

No I'm not assuming this. I'm also not typically going to source things like this. It's fundamental information easily available from a perusal of most any Party/ARJEL report, or from pretty much any industry news report anywhere. If you want a push in the right direction then check Party data pre 2011. They stopped including it in 2011, presumably as player attrition over 6 months likely exceeded 90% and that's not a pretty stat to show. In 2010 it was just under 90% of accounts being completely inactive after 6 months. You can further source yourself how much the average player spends on online poker - ~ $20 a week, ARJEL has them making ~ €100 of BETS per month. And keep in mind those figures are not the latest. The consistent trend has been: fewer new players, less deposited per player, fewer hands played, faster and higher attrition rates. Put that all together and you can start to get some intelligent estimates on how much new players play.

The thing is that you all underestimate how clueless most of the managment of most of the poker rooms are. Most of the managers responsible for poker never even played online poker(Rational Group being notable exception). They just have all business background and look at this clearly in term of short term gains profit/cost type of thinking while having no clue about "the ecosystem" and how poker really works (in their eyes it all same with betting,poker and casino games in one bag)

BTW when it goes to poker is dying stuff I thought about it for a while and I think it is oversimplification. Till like 2011 literally every poker room was offfering huge no dposit bonuses that literally eveyone could get (thats how pokerstrategy got so big with their free 50$ bankroll), same for marketing spendings

Nowadays Most of the sites either don't have the money ( after buying FTP paying fines to DOJ Rational Group can't really afford the same level of marketing like in the past same like party.bwin which has been showing net loss for a while so they can't afford it to). I mean look how succesfull 888/cassava is with their huge marketing etc.

It is just hard to quantify whether poker really become so much less popular or the impact of less marketing is so big (which in my opinion is more likely)

I don't see any evidence that poker is dying or that there is less marketing money spent on poker.

The Market today is just not in the US anymore. But in EU pokerstars advertises in trains on the radio there are whole TV shows comparable to a late night show dedicated to poker.

Also don't see how 888 is that successful. They are relative to the small competition but its not like they can threaten stars. Also dont see how it is that different from the others.

What evidence are you talking about?

The only business model that has made big impacts was bodog which is clearly focusing on rec players.

Didn't read much of the thread but I'd speculate that most pros would have given up on poker if they ran horrible at first.

Online total liquidity recently reached its lowest point in 6 years. That's not even accounting for the fact that the increase in mass tabling has artificially increased liquidity. The numbers in terms of actual players as opposed to raw liquidity are likely substantially more dire.

Well I think there is a difference between poker and online poker.

Online poker is going down the drain. The data is quite clear on that. Even stars is losing.

I believe however that it is self made by the industry. I don't think we are having a lack of players wanting to play but the problem is what happens to new players.

I think the key problem is the fact that winning at online poker is impossible for an average joe which in essence is the promise of poker. Poker is supposed to be a skill game. A skill game means there must people that win and lose and people that are supperstars. There also must be players in the middle that get beaten by very good players but can easily beat weaker players.

As such if you are somewhat intelligent and put in some work into the game you should be able to beat at least some of the lower levels.

However this is not the case with online poker. In live poker it is, which is why live poker is more and more popular.

Today online poker is actually just gambling. But people expect it to not be so. However they will clearly realize that beating the game is impossible quickly and then quit. They cant even move down, all they can do is quit.

If you want to gamble why play poker. Other gambling games are much better choices. You get any action you want at whatever frequency you want as well in poker you need to find the game you like and then you need to wait and wait and wait until you finally get a hand and when u do you likely win as well.

So we need to turn the game back into a skill game. As simple as that.

1/2 of the players that play need to win. If you lose at a level you need to be able to move down and have a better chance there.

But the variance is the product of the game variance and the stakes. Meaning that you can have the same variance in any game just by selecting an appropriate stake.

Variance is part of the game. True. What is ur point?