maybe 2000 max, good post above me but just cause 1892 people binked some mtts dont mean they are pros. Think of all the bigger buyin tournies that get donked by rec players etc...

minimum wage in portugal gives you under 7k a year (doing the math with monthly salary x 14)

so with 10k I guess you'd live fine and above average here

is this such a hard goal?

really, it's a question I'd like to see answered

Yep, totally agree... and I feel like I addressed the "binked some mtts" factor as part of the admittedly large margin of error. (I probably should have thrown out anyone with exorbitantly high ROIs, as these are people who had one or two big scores to push themselves over my arbitrary threshold.)

As I said, it only narrows the estimate in that I think we can safely rule out 0-500. But it also makes me quite iffy on the more-than-10,000, which is where I was stood I voted in the poll. If tournament play is only a small percentage of overall online poker play, then five figures is still reasonable.

According to PokerScout, there are 84,276 players online as of this post. The left-side table suggests that 20,629 of them are at the play-money tables. And 14,204 are playing cash games. Would it be completely out of line to conclude that the remaining 49K or so are in tournaments?

And sure, perhaps Stars gets a higher proportion of tournament play than Tilt because of the way those two sites brand themselves. So perhaps it's a safer statement to suggest that tournament play represents at the very least a majority of overall online play.

All I know is that I'm starting to lean toward the under on 10,000, although by how much I'm not sure.

If $7K is minimum wage per annum, would $10K (42.9 percent higher) be "fine and above average?"

In California, the minimum wage is $8 per hour. A person making that amount for 40 weeks for 50 weeks a year would have a pre-tax income of $16,000. So the proportional income to your scenario would be $22,857. I would imagine that's a very, very tough living no matter where you live in the Golden State.

Obviously, the disparity between the haves and have-nots will vary from country to country, and the livability of the state minimum wage is always a hot debate topic over here. Plus I have never set foot in Portugal. But based solely on my insular experience as a life-long Californian, making 43 percent more than minimum wage hardly seems like a comfortable living.

small sample here, but out of about the first 25 "pro" players I have as contacts on a messenger platform that were online "pros" as of 2011 black friday only 8 of them are still playing online. Obv BF gave a big hit but I wouldnt doubt if thats the case across the board or even higher to some extent considering how much better players have gotten, and the dryness of games and the lack of sites to play on for some

I forgot to convert to USD, so it's about 9,000USD per year.


And yes, you can make a decent living with ~10,000 USD around here. Take into consideration that the economy is crap and getting a job is no longer at the reach of everyone.

Furthermore, I'm speaking from a country which is still on the brighter side of things. If you think about the reality of eastern countries or south america, you'd find that 10k a year is a goal most only dream of...

Great post Wilbury twist.

I may be misunderstanding what the OP is asking so correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think he is only asking about online pros. I'm not sure of the ratio of online pros to live pros, but I'm sure there is a decent amount of them too.

I am a rec player, but I've noticed a lot of players at my home casino that are there almost every time I go. Of course spending 40 hrs playing poker live doesn't mean you are a pro, but I think we can assume some of them are. We must also add players that make less than $40k online, but also have some live poker earnings as well.

Buffalo are fish??

I mean, do they really have fins and gills and scales??

Lee

yes its ok, i do that in portugal on micros. but here on 2p2 and america its lol cos its a unknow poor country.
only pros who make 200k per year.

Two of your friends are 2012 Olympians.

Hahaha. Yeah, two in 2012, one in 2010.

Math is idiotic. WP.

Im even wondering if there are even 10k winning players online

I have well over 5000 regs marked in low-high stake sngs and note many more each day. If there are a similar number of cash game regs then surely there are over 10k winning regs.

I know at least 15 I play with just here in Tampa.... If I stop playing it would probably go down to 11

Well, I just OPR'd a friend of mine, he's ranked ~6800th on OPR for MTTs on Pokerstars this year and has a +13% ROI over 3k tourneys at an ABI of $24, is in the 99.6th percentile and has 9.3k profit. That's only on Pokerstars for 2013.

So yeah, there are clearly more than 10,000 people who are profitable in Pokerstars MTTs in 2013, let alone across SnGs/Cash Games, and on other sites that aren't stars.

So you wonder for no reason, there are more than 10k winning players online. I have notes on over a thousand of them for MTTs and i'm one player playing one game format on one poker site.

Hell, I live on an island of 2500 people and on this island alone there are 5 people I know of who are up lifetime online (2 pros, one being me, plus 3 winning amateurs plus a couple others who are almost breakeven and may become winners in the future)

lot's or russian etc micro nits that make more with poker than they would at other jobs in real life so the number is still prob pretty high. Obviously not in the states.

No, but the old Bison herds were very easy for the pros to decimate just like the herds of poker beginners in the early post Moneymaker "boom times". Live and online. Not anymore.

Are you guys kidding me that only 2k players in the world make a living at online poker? If so then what's the point I quit

a few years ago it was an article in a swedish paper that more then 2000 Swedes had poker as a full time job, so yeah world wide it's def over 20k