Im a slight winning player online and have a medium/small kielbasa... Just to set the record straight for me.

You guys are off a little bit. As winning poker players we can tend to overestimate how hard it is to win at poker online. It is very hard, but not that hard. All the studies that Ive seen over the years point to the fact that 20%+ or so of overall players are winners. That is excluding RB of any form such as bonuses or promotions. For example, Sharkscope did a study of their database in 2009 and found that 26% of tourny players were overall winners. They redid the study this year and found that number had dropped to 22%. I believe Ive seen other studies and numbers in the recent past to suggest that cash games are similar. Also, to suggest that players that took the time to find 2+2 and become members are worse overall than the average population seems off as well. Id suspect the % of winners to be higher on 2+2.


Here is a link to the older and newest Sharkscope study results if anyone is interested in a site by site breakdown.

http://sharkscopers.com/what-fractio...s-are-winners/

http://sharkscopers.com/what-fractio...inners-part-2/

For people to lazy or not interested enough to go to the links, here is a great segment regarding the myth about the number of winners in poker and some guesses about what causes it which I believe are pretty spot on.

Their numbers must be wrong.

Also, there are more winning regs as you move up in stakes. I assume most of the nl1k and nl2k regs are long term winners because most of them play pretty solid.

Lol yeah. To be perfectly honest, I used to think the 5% figure was accurate as well. I was always told 5%. Years ago I saw 2+2er Josem throw out a 15-30% number, or something in that range. I trusted his assessment more than my own in this area so I backed off what I was previously taught. It turns out, at least from the few legit studies I can recall seeing since then, that he was pretty much dead on.

Absolutely.

I've always figured that the number of professionals to be 5% or less of online poker players. That said, I could definitely see another 10-20% being winning recreational players.

Does anyone know if there is a way to download hand histories from Bovada? I'd really like to analyze my play there. Thanks.

Yes. In your account page in the client you can request and receive hand histories 24 hours after you play them.

You can buy the Bovada Hand Converter if you wish to import them into HM or PT as well.

Good luck.

Just wanted to add you can only obtain hand histories for up to a month. Anything past that is not obtainable.

I have no inside information on this information, and always would have "felt" that 5 or 10% would have been right... But literally every database (including one of around 500 million hands, if I remember right) showed that somewhere between 18% and 35% of players were net winners over the sample... And that's assuming that there is no rakeback. If you add in rakeback/rewards/etc then the figure gets higher.

One of the things that I suspect causes this is the fact that there can be a small number of players who have hugely negative results: that is, it is possible for one player to effectively fund multiple winners. I guess this is because it is much easier to lose $100k than it is to win $100k. Presumably the perfect example of this are some nosebleed games which can run around one depositor and 5 professionals.

It's hard to really put a number on it because they are going to count +$1 in those database studies. Is that considered a winning player? That also holds true for people -$1. I wouldn't be surprised if it was 20%+, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it was much less. It'd be interesting if someone did a study where they took (x) amount of small winners and losers out to see what they came up with.

I just downloaded Bovada, but can't open the application. I get a message that says "You can't open the application BovadaPoker because it is not supported on this type of Mac." Can someone help me with this? Thanks!

Mac system requirements for Bovada.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard or later
800 MHz G4 processor or faster
1 GB memory (RAM) or greater
70 MB of available disk space

I understand your thought process. However, that still doesn't explain how 26% of tournament players were winners in 2009, and 22% are today.



This.

It's only downloadable for 7 days now

I am surprised to read that that's the case. I don't know the cause of that.

Over the last five years there have been a variety of changes to SNGs - skill of players, blind structures, and maybe other things.

With less fish and lower win rates, odds are more people are borderline BE than back in the good ole days.

Anyone playing the wsop free roll through the sportsbook promotion?

Just for giggles, I just wrote a simulation. I picked a recent tournament on Bovada, and used the prize structure of that. It was a 130-person tournament with 15 people paid. I simulated the same (identical) 130 people entering this tournament over and over again. Note that with every player identical, everyone will be a losing player in the long run, due to fees.

After (numerous simulations of) 100 tournaments, about 36-37% of players were profitable.
After 1,000 tournaments, about 20% were still profitable.
After 10,000 tournaments, only about 0.5% were profitable.

Obviously, take those numbers with a grain of salt, given all the (unrealistic) assumptions made. Mainly just did it to entertain myself between hands.

Unaware.

I would venture to say that a huge percentage of 2+2'ers are losing players who blame their lack of skill on it no longer being 2004. As if poker is dead now that the boom is over and there were no winning poker players pre-2000. The only thing that is dead is their abilities at this game

yeah you had to bet 50 dollars from April 28 to may 4th..... and obviously be entered into the promotion. Top 10 win 500 dollar seat to the main satellite.

only 200 runners so far with about 30 min to start

Can you play bovada poker tables from an iPhone? I know this has prolly been discussed previously but just curious

I've heard of people playing off there iphone while using a remote viewer app. Basically let's you control your computer via iPhone