Poll: Are you an overall winning player?

It seems every player you talk to is a winner. How can that be possible? Either most of us are delusional, or the losers just evaporate.

I'd like to get an honest feel for what proportion of players are winners. General lore says that 90% of online players are losers. I ran PokerTracker for awhile, not a large database, and saw more of a 60/40 split. What is the reality?

It could well be that among CardsChat players there is a higher proportion of winners. After all, many of us are here because we are students of the game.

There's no shame in losing. For one, the game needs losers. For another, it might be considered an apprenticeship. We pay our dues along the way in hopes of becoming winning players.

So I invite you to answer the poll honestly. I've made it anonymous in the hopes it will promote more honest responses.
Gary

Well there is no poll but I can honestly say I've won more than I've lost but I am still pretty awful.

No poll? Of course there's a poll. It's at the top of the page. If you can't see it, maybe there's some kind of browser compatibility problem of something. I can't see the "Quick Links" running Google Chrome, but I see them with Firefox.

True

It isn't.

Many losers are either delusion or just don't really know and think they are winners.

Seeing that the 90%(ish) statistic is based on a much larger sample than one person's database, I'm inclined to go with the generally accepted statistic and venture to guess that 90% is with +/- 5% imo.

Both of these are valid. Many players don't even pick up a book and learned to play watching WPT lolament final table editing.

I think you're going to see skewed results whether people are being honest or not. Some will lie anyway even though it is anonymous and the rest being winners goes back to the point above about this being a poker forum.

Only disagreement I have with the poll itself is the options list. Why differentiate between winning a lot/little or losing a lot/little? It's irrelevant because we are talking about overall. Overall means you're either winning or not (or possibly break even). So imo the only four choices are Winning, Losing, Break Even, and Don't Know. But it's your poll.

wat's the diff btw 'donating' and 'losing consistnely' ?

FAIL at poll making, imo.

Would you like me to change "No, I'm a donater" to "Can't beat 10nl"?

Things even my memory isn't failing me about;

1- I have only deposited, in total, $125.00.

Of that $50 was deposited at UB so I could turn around, within 4 days, to withdraw several hundred.

2- I transferred money won at Party Poker from freerolls into Netteller and then to FullTilt during the frenzy of the UEIGA crackdown, seems PP was a bit lax in controlling what happened during that time and allowed me to withdraw without depositing.

3- In total I have withdrawn about $650 and still have enough to play at 5 sites.

HOWEVER!!!!!

If you sharkscope me, none of it shows, and I look like a fish dumping buck after buck into poker.....Go figure.

1. CC will have a higher ratio of winners:losers, as will any poker forum, because the sheer fact that one visits a forum indicates they have some intention/desire to improve their poker game, which is not the case for the majority of the poker population.
2. Winners are more likely to be vocal than losers, who will be more inclined to silently lurk in the background rather than report on their progress.

And yea poll fails...what is considered winning alot? Winning $2000/month is alot for some, but for some players that would be a terrible month. I'd also be interested to learn how being a donator is different than losing consistently. I always hated polls on forums, however.

I guess I don't understand the different player results sites.

I looked at myself on Sharkscope and it shows me as never having won any money on either FT or PS. Then I looked at myself on officialpokerrankings.com and it shows the real stats, at least on tournaments. Neither of them show table games. The PokerDB shows me with the proper Stars winnings but nothing on FullTilt.

I was surprised to notice that the latter site even shows the private tournament results which is good since that's where I win mostly.

I consider myself a pretty lousy player but good enough to win against online competition. Kinda like the old chess days, 500 people show up to play in the tournament and only about 12 of us had any real chance to win it, the rest were fodder.

i win enough to fund 2 players, literally imo.

put me in 6 max and/or full ring however and i will happily donate back to the community

More concerned with the 2 that voted "I don't know". wtf?

Small sample size? :P

I've played enough hold'em to know I'm a solid winner. As far as other games go, I seem to suck at everything other than stud 8 SnG's. I'm a marginal loser at 7-card stud over 7000 hands At least that sample is too small to mean anything.

Fair enough.

I think the percentage of winners will be alot higher on a poker forum, than a poker site. People who take the time to read and learn and take the game serious enough to spend time on a forum are more likely to be successful.

I've never deposited, so I can say with certainty that I'm a winning player. I won a freeroll and got $25, then made $2500 over 2 years from that little start.

Depends on the game for me. I'm a winner in low-stakes NL single-table / HU SnGs.

I'm a loser across all sorts of other things though (MTTs, Omaha, HORSE) over a fairly small sample size. Haven't really played enough ring to make a call one way or the other.

My ROI is +38%, but I only play $5 sit and go's with ~300 ranked.
I consider this better than 92% of other poker players. So does official poker rankings.

I swear the poll wasn't there when I first opened the post but it's there now so maybe I'm just losing my mind!

Yes, that's it.

IMO this is a pointless poll.

As the OP said 'every player you talk to is a winner'

So a combination of 3 things will happen.

1. People will lie, people will miss off long periods of losses.. (because of a change in their play which they believe now makes them a winner and they have the figures to prove it.. but these figures are very much short term.. the change in play may make them a winner.. but its far too soon to tell and therefore too soon to delete the mistakes of the past)

2. Then there are the true winners.. roughly 15% of those who play make money and the top 5% make most of it!!!. These players will post honestly.

3. Few who are honest about their long term losses will post as they wont want to admit it in open forum.. not because their losses are nessecarily larger than the costs of any other serious hobby... but simply because they dont want to loose face amongst their poker peers.

The cumalative effects of these factors will lead to a poll that suggests theer are far more winners in poker than there really are.

Now you may well argue that.. this being cardschat.com, there are bound to be more winners than the rest of society.. but that underlying belief also will influence peoples choice to lie and to not post as they wont want to loose status within the group.

So the poll is pointless.. Certainly not a dig at the OP. This isnt a rant aimed at you its just pointing out the flaws in asking people simple questions and assuming the answer is going to be in any way simple.

Nothing you said is applicable to an anonymous poll. There is no point, shame, benefit, etc in lying in a poll where no one will know it was you. Now if you like you can call everyone liars that actually post in the thread, but saying the poll itself is pointless (even in your opinion) is just silly.....imo.

does the term 'cognitive dissonance' mean anything to you?

Yes it does, thank you for asking. But because the poll is anonymous, I disagree with the applicability with respect to the poll itself. Hence my point that you can call the actual posters in the thread liars if you like (though it wouldn't go over well imo), but I disagree with calling anonymous poll results a by-product of cognitive dissonance.

You know you are a winning player if you consistantly withdraw yet dont deposit

15th of every month I withdraw from my various accounts and I have never redeposited except to open accounts at a different sites to play cardschat events over last 18months the bankroll I have not withdrawn has increased significantly I dont allow it to decrease.

On average I take around £600 a month out so I know I am a winning player. I play in a lot of cardschat events and know that a lot of forum players are better than me (certainly at tourneys at least). I would imagine that the proportion of winning players on this forum is massively out of line with the general online poker population

id say overall its 50/50 either you are winning or losing.

49/49 actually


































2% tie ldo

Looks like nobody wants to admit to being break even or a loser. Over my career, I'm pretty much break even, probably a slight loser

I cant lie...i lost $100 so far...so now I'm going to try to win it back from freerolls but looks like im a losing player for now

In $ terms I am a winner, but only because I play freerolls and small $ tourneys and sit n goes. If I had paid 50c for every tourney I have played then I would be bankrupt !!!!!

i think you needed to make your poll question a little more clear and percise. i marked i'm a winning poker player. Not because i have won online though. I have lost 50 dollars 0nline and that was my learning 50 i also lost 50 in my last live torney.

But before that the last 3 live torneys i have played in, i have cashed and the last 5 home games i have played in, i have walked out with an avarge of 50 more than i came with.

So yea i would consider myself a winning live poker player. But i don't consider myself a good poker player just average. that would be a better poll question.

I've invested $0 in online poker and have made + $500 dollars online, yet have lost + $ 480 online,
Overall does that make me a winner? In poll I said I was overall a loser,
but maybe that's not true. lol feel like a loser for sure though :P.
I've got a BR going again on a site so there's hope :P.

On both sharkscope and offical poker rankings I have negative ROI on most of my accounts. However, I have still made some money. I voted myself to be a winner, although with the pace that I have earned money - I am more likely to be considered break even or marginal winnner.

The poll has already been clarified and is exactly the question that was sought. OP is looking for honest votes in an anonymous poll to see where folks list themselves in relationship to being an overall winning player. Overall means exactly that, all inclusive. Not this week or last month but all of it together.

However you are welcome to start your own poll as well.

I am a winner, way ahead in these games than most of u dweebs. Not enuff to pay for a cadiallac, but a winner. LMFAO

no

I said yes because my early winnings far exceed anything I have lost since then. I was lucky enough to learn poker in a school of drunk fish and won more in a few months of play than I did in my first year of working a regular job.

That lasted 3-4 years. I was the only guy I knew who never had a job when he was a minor. All my money came from poker. Then I hardly played for about 15 years. Just the occasional home game. By the time I discovered online poker it was an entirely different game. And I sucked at it. My first year I didn't play enough to show up in the rankings on OPR but enough to see I had a -49% ROI. If you were to look me up now you would see either a -16 ROI (tilt) or just about 0 ROI (stars) both of which place me at about better than 80% that all online players per OPR. So I have no problem believing that 90% of players lose. Strangely I'm ranked higher of Tilt than on pokerstars despite having a better ROI on stars. Even online, despite my negative ROI I consider myself a winning player. I've never made a deposit at any site. My bankroll across 4 sites is a little over $300 bucks. Not a lot but all profit so I would say overall that makes me a winning player.

I'm just not winning much.