What percentage of poker players actually win

Does anyone know roughly the general percentage of people that actually win at Poker?

I know in horse racing, it is something like less than 10% of people actually win long term. This is more then likely due to the large takeouts. Is there something similar for poker players?

It is easy to say that for every loser there has to be a winner, but some of those winners end up giving it back, and in the long run, rakes have an impact as well.

poker rooms know it but i am not sure they would release that information but i guess, more than %10 of constant poker players must be in profit.

The problem with this particular statistic is that it's so dependent on how you measure. Of all the people currently playing poker, I think the number of life-time winners may be pretty high; maybe even upwards of 30%. However, the vast majority of people who stop playing poker do it after they go bust, so if you roughly stipulate that winners play and losers quit, then a sample of all the people playing today will be heavily weighted towards people who are winners. If you sample the entire planet for people who has at some point or another played poker (and somehow got honest answers) I think you'd find that less than 10% are overall winners.

I have read that for online and casino players consistent winners are about 10%.

This is a small number, but I have a feeling it could be accurate, and I will tell you why.

It is not that there are not more than 10% of players who can win... it's the part about who can actually HOLD ON to their winnings. as we all know, disciplined bankroll management over the long term is deceptively difficult but absolutely KEY.

But I would love to see reliable stats on this. I am a winning micro cash game player. I wonder what percentile that makes me.

There might be variation at different levels too.

You will hear about people saying their Poker Tracker database shows something like 60/40 loser to winner. But here's the rub as I see it.

Winners will play consistently for a long time over many many hands. Losers may dump $50 or $100 at a time into an account and then disappear for a long time. Maybe even losing it all in a afternoon playing WAY over their heads. Therefore these databases are skewed to winners as they will be the ones that are in them for lots of hands.

I can anecdotaly support this as I see myself sitting frequently with another known winner at a table, chances are were both in the green with 4 losing players I've never seen before. The next night I might run into my "buddy" again, but most likely never see the folks that lost to us.


cAPS

Oh, and yes this is a great point... if really 40% were winners it might not be a secret.

Online poker site have no flashing box that says:

"Download our free client now, make a deposit and become one of the 90% of folks who LOSE! TODAY!"

Hee hee.

There's a supposedly "Poker Tracking" site I recently heard of (logged onto) ---'officialpokerrankings.com', where yer supposed to be able to track ANY player and their find out what per-centile in all the games they've played! ROI-% wins/loses-etc! Wulp, I'm here to tell ya--It's a farce!!! I tried tracking myself, and lo and behold,1) they only track FT-PS-Party Poker-and ongame, whatever that is! 2) PS is just a partial track3) No UB or Carbon or anyother, fer that matter! AND they didn't even have THAT right! I have only just recently deposited and played at PS and UB--CC buy ins for the most part, and I actually won my 1st CC PS buy in! Not to mention I am ahed at BOTH PS and UB! Haven't lost a dime. I'm up about $23 at UB and $15 or so at Stars! Mostly from ring games, but like I said, my 1st CC win at PS and NONE of it was tracked! They even got me with a -17% ROI! How's that possable when I have yet to loose anything??? I don't think it's possable to know what percentage of players actually win!!!

The problem with all the tracking software is they dont cover every site so they arent that reliable, the one mentioned above hardly lists me playing anything yet I have played consistantly over the last 4 years but cos most of it is on the microgaming sites most of the tracking software dont recognise those sites so my stats are very low, plus they dont include private games etc so its a very innacurate sysytem IMO.

As for the original question i do remember reading an article saying that only 8% of online players made a profit in their poker playing careers, how reliable that is I have no clue but it wouldnt surprise me if its that low at all.

Well OPR is very interesting but like so many other tools/sites it is primarily (completely in it's case) tourney based.

It shows me as having played 3 $.10 tourneys I was ITM in two of them by the way. I think I might be up something like 60 cents as a tourney player.

It has no record of my ring play which is quite a different statistic for me.

Once again. I think how we get to this number is important. How do we define "winner"? Over how long a time frame, or hands played? What exactly is an accurate sample.

I am really interested in this. Does no one have better info?

hahahaha CAPSLOCK----that's an awesome ad slogan!

Id say 25-30% are long term winners. 10% long term winners is foolishly low, 90% losing players? I dont think so, theres a guy that posts ALL of full tilts 6 max 1/2 games, for the month, and its always about 30/70.

Right. But who quits? The losers. Then they're replaced with eventually fresh blood, and then they play, lose and quit. The winners stay, some of them win for longer than others.

The overall key is that winners (typically) don't quit. So since there's probably been millions of players who have played some online poker, but only maybe 500k today, did the three million who don't play anymore quit as winners or losers?

My money is on them having a net loss.

I'm one of those who thinks the percentage of winners is actually high, but I'm basing my opinion purely on ring games.

Every day I play with players who are new to my PT database. Some are net winners at the hands I see them play, some are net losers. We only see a snapshot of their poker career, but we have to assume that the slice that we see can be extrapolated to some extent. My percentage of winning players stays near 40%, and my percentage of losing players stays near 60%.

The same arguments for less winners works the same way for less losers. Some losers get better and dig themselves out of their losses. Some winners get worse, or move up to harder stakes, and dip into the red. Many winners will at some point in their career be losers, and many losers will at some point dip into profit.

And don't forget that big losers can fund an entire table. There are a lot of players who deposit $200, play with little regard for the money, then give up when they go bust. Net result: 1 loser, and numerous potential winners, after PS takes their rake.

If 40% of the players at a given table are profitable over an hour's play (a fair assumption, I think), then why can't we believe that 40% of poker players will be profitable over an extended period of time over a multitude of tables?

Here's an example. A player grinds up $300 profit at the 10NL tables. He then moves up to 25NL and loses $250 of it before dropping down. That player is still a net winner, and he just dumped $250 of potential profit into 25NL. Any money not withdrawn stays in the system. An important point in this scenario: losers generally lose big and winners generally win small. That adds up to a lot of dead money for the barely capable players to pick up.

My money's on 40%, or thereabouts. And that's not even counting money-added tournaments or deposit/reload/FPP bonuses that cut into the rake.

More likely example:

Player grinds up $300 at 10nl. He moves up to 25nl and when he's lost half of it tilts crazily and decides to go up to 50nl. He sits at 50nl with 3 buy-ins, loses it, and either deposits again and plays 100nl or quits.

This is the problem with your reasoning; you can't extrapolate this.

Since my direct approach didn't work, I'll try an analogy.

If, at the end of each month, I count the number of wounded US soldiers in Iraq, I might end up with, say 5%. This might lead me to extrapolate that only 5% of all soldiers are wounded in Iraq. This is not true. The wounded soldiers go home and are replaced with unwounded ones.

Unless someone can show me that people who quit poker are equally likely to be net winners and net losers, the statistic of how many players are winners in PokerTracker is, if not meaningless, close to it.

It's not to hard to make money. Just play freerolls and small buy-ins with money added. I'm ahead of the game and I don't consider myself a great players. I don't win much but it's a hobby that pays for itself. I have yet to have a losing month. I no longer play ring games. My buy-ins are normally $2.20 or less.

I get your point now, and it makes a lot of sense.

Well I agree with you, but as a counter to this, I play pretty regularly and see a good amount of players. The ones who play more are most certainly the winners. I just did a filter of players I had 1k+ hands with and on average they win at a rate of 1.08 PTBB/100. The average winrate for everyone (includes the winners above) is -7.08 PTBB/100. I still can't figure out how it's so low (since without rake it'd be even and rake is only 2-4 PTBB/100 depending on stakes), but that's just the number the database gives me.

But the point is that I'm observing the winners more, meaning that my database will be more likely to be more accurate because it's seeing this trend that you point out in this post. I still have about a 65-35 distribution and I really don't believe that is true.

I think it has more to do with the fact that people move up, as in the Irexes thread, to the point where they lose. So you have someone who can beat up to 25nl. They'll beat 25nl, move up to 50nl, and then continue to try to beat 50nl losing their entire BR in the process. They may have a good run that convinces them they're good enough to beat it and that 25nl is beneath them. Then you have the people who beat 50nl and can't beat 100nl, etc. on up to the $200/$400 NLHE games where people keep taking shots.

If we follow the axiom that a player will move up the point where they lose, the only winning players in the world would be the ones beating the highest stakes games. Since obviously some people can swallow their pride and realize they're making good money where they are and there's no point in moving up, that's why there are more than 5 winning players on each site. I think I've seen numbers ranging from 5-10% and that's what I'd guess is accurate.

I also think that FP has a point for smaller samples, because you basically see the winners as those who get lucky, and mine's probably skewed because I table-select to avoid the very players who would be winning in my db over the long-term so representatively I have more hands from the weaker opponents than from the stronger ones. But I think the factor above is much more influential than just that losers quit. I think when you combine the factors that winners play more, losers quit faster, and that most winners will move up to the point where they don't win anymore, that's where you get the 5-10% figure.

I think a lot might come down to the semantics of what constitutes a winning player. Take Zach's example. Someone buys in for $50 and starts grinding micro stakes. He moves up until he starts losing. If, at any point, he withdraws $51, he's now a winning player for the life of his poker career. He's playing with profit, and even if he goes bust playing 200NL, he's still up $1. Provided he doesn't deposit again, he's a winner for life.

Add to that everyone who has never deposited. Sure, they might only have a BR of $2.72 from freeroll winnings, but that's 100% profit. They cannot be losers, because they haven't put any of their own money in.

And how many players sign up for the deposit bonus, grind it out, then withdraw. Even if they lost money, as long as their bonus is more than their losses, they are net winners.

Total Withdrawals + Current Bankroll - Total Deposits = Net Profit. If, at any point in a poker player's career, that number is above zero, he's a winning player. If you ask how many players are winning right now, you have to include those players who are grinding their way up, and have yet to go bust.

For the record, I have no idea what the number is now, but I think it's an interesting discussion.

but then again how many "winning players"
are still showing a profit AFTER TAXES are taken out ??

Uh, 100%

There isn't any income from any source that can put you at a negative number simply from taxes.

it is not an easy thing to make aliving from poker....you have to play alot and you have to win alot.....you need to finish in the money around 24-25 percent and win 1-2 large tourneys a year....amongst other things..lol

And note this doesn't take into account moving up and losing.

The exception of course is showing a win one year and a loss the next. Say one wins $10k the first year, assume 10% taxes you now have $9k. Next year the same person moves up and loses 9.5k. Before taxes they are still up $500, but because of taxes they are now down $500.

Not sure what you're saying here, Zach.

Zach, the biggest bias in YOUR database is the fact that as you can't datamine on PS, all the hands you track are hands at tables where you were sitting. And since you are a winning player, you increase the likelihood that your opponents are losing on the hands they play at your tables.

Take the database of the biggest fish on PS (provided he uses one), and chances are he sees most of his opponents making a healthy profit.

I agree that there's a sampling bias in Zach's database, but I have to stress that even when we do manage to datamine objectively, the only thing our sample tells us is how many people are winning players for that period of time. But maybe that's what we're discussing. How many of the people currently playing are currently winning.

The real problem, and I took the liberty to check this logic with my math genius wife, is that the player base we're looking at isn't static. There's a shift in population, and I contend that the shift is overwhelmingly that random players enter, but losing players leave. In statistical terms, we're not sampling the same population every time. Therefore, our samples are not reliable.

A way to go about this, which would still contain some margin of error, is to datamine every table across all stakes for a longer period of time. That way, people don't get to move up or down (as Zach mentioned) and escape our proverbial net for when they finally stop playing.

That's about what I'd have guessed, basing it on OPR stats I've seen. I've seen people in the low 60% rankings with losing records, and people in the upper 60%'s with winning records.

But it's not the most scientific way of determining it.

That might be one of the LEAST scientific ways of determining it.

But I still hold to the thought that the main problem with the "60ish % of people in my logs are winners" suffers from "who ends up in the logs" syndrome.

From my personal perspective I play becasue the game is addictive. It's a tremendous amount of fun and more so becasue the money is real.

I've won money in freerolls that I've parlaed (sp?) into some decent stacks and then lost them. I even had a guy stake me once becasue he thought I was good enough to play his money. And, it worked out. I made him a few bucks and he shared a little with me (which I grew and then lost). This process took about two months and hundreds of hours of play.

My bankroll management skills are pretty good too. I played with a starting stack of $17.50 daily for over two months before I lost it. And it's not hard to figure out that I won exactly as much as I lost.

What's interesting is that the site I play at pays out ~1 point for each dollar it takes in in rake. I've earned 131.94 points over the last two months. So rough calculation I payed a little less than $132 to the site and $1319 has passed through my hands. 10 days ago I had $100. I kept playing and now my only choice is go back to freerolls or make a deposit.

The best reason to play poker is that it is an irreplaceable thrill. But I don't think it's profitable for many of the players at all. Even me, and I personally, think I am great!

Here you go based on some data

I agree, the winning percentage is very low, but I bet the number actually earning a living wage playing is well below 1%. I would love to be in that 1%, but I certainly won't stake my financial well being on it.

I can tell you that from dealing, I see a very low % of players that are ahead in the long run. First, playing 1/2 NL at a B&M casino is the hardest way to make a profit from poker, because the rake is so high. I would say that probably 5-10% of the players are winning players and the other 90-95% are donating to the winners and the poker room/dealers.

I read somewhere, maybe in Greenstein's book, that only 5% of poker players are consistant winners. Only 1% are actually able to hold on to their winnings and not gamble them away on some other means.

I play regularly with about 20 different players in home cash games along with a regular monthly tourneys with about 50 players that show up. About 2/3 of these 20 players either play or have played online. If you add up winnings/losses over the last 2 years I can confidently tell you 2 of us(WVHillbilly and myself) are the only winning players in the group.

I know that is a tiny group of people to extract a number from but most of these guys play all of the time and still do not win.

I think that only the players that truly understand BRM can become winning players when its all said and done.

This thread is full of so many numbers and math its making my head hurt! lol
It is very interesting though! Lots of valid points from both ends of the spectrum! This is probably something that will never have a 100% solid answer and always be a little skewed either way.