90% of players win online? really?

Well when I started in poker I lost a lot of money, in fact I lost several grand and went broke. I learned a valuable lesson went and did some research applied proper bank roll management and won back several grand. I have dabbled in cash games only briefly, the vast vast majority of my time online is spent in tournaments/ sit and goes and has always been this way. I just noticed a few odd things about sharkscope.

Firstly I know I lost several grand so why does Sharkscope show my peak lowest point at been minus 600 only or something?

I noticed that it starts me on $600 well I won came first in the very sit and go I played on pokerstars. it was an $12 180 player turbo sit and go. Don't congratulate me for that I chased every flush draw and straight draw and seemed to never miss and played many hands I shouldn't off. EG it was a fluke. Well could that be why I started on 600, cause I only deposited 50 on my first deposit.

well Now my stats show me been positive ROI ok not much just %2, but it didn't seem right. See when I started poker I had four grand. I went broke. I started to win after i took time out did research and came back. I have been winning since december and cashed out several times.

I work variable hours in my day job so only make 200 a week.

so If i won back everything I lost and a little profit why do I only have 2k now? what happened to the rest? were talking 25 weeks. thats 5k Separate, to any poker winnings. I have not deposited on poker stars since January, and only deposited $50 once for full tilt and once for partypoker since then and thats it.

I of course deposited $600 to take advantage of the recent reload bonus a few days back.

However that aside whats going on. Ok i pay rent and food and spend liberally, but have I been spending it all?

Well something strange I noticed about Sharkscope is despite them saying 24 or 26% of players profit from sit and goes on poker stars you find a different picture if you look for yourself. I notice that pick any player at random and about 90% show positive ROI.

why? I thought only 24% should. see I wanted to know if I am ready to move up stakes again and took a sample of 100 for each stake to compare seriously 90% of the players I looked up out of 200 showed positive ROI.

So before I get the last year and a halfs worth of bank statements and check properly does if I show a positive ROI on sharkscope and a positive profit which I do is it possible I could still be a losing sit and go player?

Are Sharkscope/Poker stars involved in a conspiracy to decieve players into thinking there winning players when there not.

ps I know 200 may seem like a small amount of data but I have looked up stats many times before and not recorded and most of the time the ROI is positive.

I don't have the original data but I can make new data besides unwitnessed collected data is useless because i could easily fix it.

ROI should be negative most of the time.

I am confident enough to give out my aim run through this with anyone who would challenge me on this and admit publicly if I am proven wrong.

most players on shark scope show up positive ROI, most players on shark scope should show negative ROI.

something is amiss someone explain it to me.

LukeSilver said:

90% of players lose online? really?

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FYP, sounds about right.

D'wilius said:

FYP, sounds about right.

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I wouldn't be surprised if that percentage did lose online but sharkscope shows most players to be winners thats why i am asking the question it seems weird.

it depends 90% of which population you consider.

if the population is the whole poker community, then probably 90% are losers.

if the population is the people currently sitting at your table, then you have a huge selection bias as the winners play a lot more often and longer hours and more tables than the losers do, so you might have a large majority of winners at each table.

No idea how you chose your sample (sorry, if you mentioned it was tl;dr ), but I've looked at my OPR when I haven't been playing and a 0% roi ranked in the 80th percentile.

Sidenote, its avg roi at sharkscope not overall (unless you can change settings), so if you lose alot at higher stakes and then move down and win you can have a positive roi listed there while losing overall. Still that wouldn't explain mostly winners, but I don't trust your sample as an accurate reresentation at sharkscope.

According to shark scope 1/3 of all online SnG players are wining player.

http://www.sharkscope.com/#general

and this

http://www.sharkscopers.com/blog/thestatistician/what-fraction-online-poker-players-are-winners

If you play added games with right #'s very hard to lose any money

Paw_kit Aces said:

According to shark scope 1/3 of all online SnG players are wining player.

http://www.sharkscope.com/#general

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^^^ i must be the 1 in 3 .
I would say 90% lose in cash games.

I think 90% of all the players were winners because only the winners were still on.

All the losers had stopped playing because they lost there cash to the people you were looking at.

I will admit I don't follow Sharkscope stats and I don't really care for it. The reason Is I play low limits and I don't feel like dishing out extra money. I'm sure it's a useful tool for serious poker players. All I do is keep track of my winnings/losses with pen and paper. lol I do remember reading a article online stating that only 20% of online players are winners. I don't recall who wrote the article or even if it's legit but the figures seem to make sense to me. I find it hard to believe the stats mentioned in the article above.

Sharkscope numbers and facts on me are totally wrong.
Alot more to being a winning player then just winning. Money management is more important then being good player. 90% may be winners but less then 10% are in control.

I don't put a lot of credence in these figures for accuracy. Sharkscope has dumped results in the past and doesn't include all categories of tournament - so i wouldn't put too much reliability on that. As a free user I like to login sometimes and look at my graphs but the true ones that I can construct using Excel are much more accurate. The same is true of thepokerdb for tournaments. And what about cash games?!? Certainly would not subscribe to any of these.

I never do well on cash games.... lose about 60% of the time, MMt and Sng work for me, each have are own ways

of course I guess that there are far more losing players than winning ones
I don't know very well these sites like sharkscopes or poker-edge, and don't know if the information we can find there is reliable...
I hope so, because they sell them quite expensive

The reason your sharkscope isnt showing your total losses is because it doesnt track your losses at cash tables

Jarod1231 said:

The reason your sharkscope isnt showing your total losses is because it doesnt track your losses at cash tables

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Sounds to me that sharkscope isn't too complete. I don't use this program and I don't want too.

Its complete in what it advertises to track, sngos. There's a diff. site if you want cash game results.

Sharkscope only tracks sit n gos. You could have lost alot on cash games. But im sure its nice to win a tournament and get some of it back

When I went through a period of playing about 100 sngs a week I kept track of my results manually. Then I went to compare with sharkscope and found that it was only keeping track of about 1/3 of my results. Therefore I'm less likely to believe sharkscope is representative of the poker community as a whole. Unless a independant reasearch company looks into this I dont think we will ever get the true figure. Even then It could still be off.

(Sngs played on Party, sharkscope might not track that site well but my point is still valid)

im not in that 90 percent

I find that OPR tends to track my results much better than Sharkscope or any other stats tracker I've tried, including PokerDB which is still having problems with FT results apparently. So when I'm scoping villains, I tend to trust OPR more.

A far more interesting question is: How much % of the online poker players is profitable in the long run, lets say 3 years? So i am talking about players who can support themselves through poker. Its kind of hard tho to calculate this.....Or you would have to look up every player 50nl and up on certain sites...

i think most players lose initially, and results level off after time

I like to use Sharkscope to check out the regs that play in my normal small stakes SNG's. Usually I will only check if this person seems to have a different style than normal or if they are total nits. It can help my game some trying different strategies that the winning regs do. I will only trust these figures after 1000 games or more and only to a certain extent.

Also nice to scope myself every now and then to see what other playes see when they scope me.

As for winners online, 90% winners is just funny to hear. I think for SNG's it's more like 30% and as far as cash games go I would think there would be no more than 20%.

One fact for sure is there are many more decent players online now than when I started playing in 2004. I used to be able to play ABC poker and win often but now it only works at the smallest levels.