okay, I'm not a noob, but here's a noob question anyway

[DunningKruger]

The numbers I surmised were among regulars and no I don't have any reason to believe it couldn't be as high as 1 in 4 or so. I do think that when you try to account for everyone who's ever played a hand of online poker the figure gets a lot lower. Surely there are a lot of people who flame out and can't afford to put in the semi consistent volume (without a couple extra mortgages on their house or something) that to me is part of being considered an actual poker player. I'm a winning player and most of my poker friends are winning players so maybe that's predisposed me to thinking that 19 out of 20 is too high. I still remain skeptical that 5% is the figure and still remain interested in any solid reasoning to suggest that it is.

 

[cardriverx]

if I had to guess I'd say between 1% - 3% of online poker players are in the black given like a sample size (i.e. more than 1 sit on cash table walk away after winning a hand).

 

[AtiFCOD]

I think this 5% is ok. Most of the players just play for fun. Like travelers to Las Vegas. They just go there to have good times and play poker (I guess most of them doesnt even know the rules of the game)...and mostly lose.

 

[LD1977]

Guys, 5% would mean that you need genius level of skill to beat poker. C'mon.

 

[DrazaFFT]

It really sounds awfully low and really kills a wish for learning and improving when i think that there are 19:1 chances that i become winner at poker but if we put it on a different way it could be understandable, like this, who we count as a poker players everyone who ever deposited on poker site, we already excluded zinga and freerollers because they cant lose, now what percentage of players learn the rules and their journey of learning poker ends i would guess that it is at least 50% of players but i wouldn't be surprised it it is lot more, now from the rest 50% there had to be half of them whose learning was few youtube vids or 2 or 3 articles which they didn't understand, now from the remaining 25% of total depositing, real money players, we have people who are learning improving reading, posting on forum but half of them just cant break even which brings us to 12,5% pf total players who are winning but when you deduct players who just cant follow brm you get the percentage of 5-6%

I just put it this way as a long shot guess, maybe to make myself feeling better

 

[Arjonius]

It's not hard to believe that the % of regs who win is substantially higher than the % of all players who win. The thing here is... what % of all players are regs? I have no real idea, but let's say it's 20%. Let's also say 25-30% of regs are winners. If we simplify our model by saying no non-regs are winners, then we end up with 5-6% of all players being winners. we can change thesw numbers of course, but unless we change them quite a bit, the % of all players who are winners stays quite low.

 

[sunburnt2k11]

this posting for the amount of buy to bankroll is good. i was using the jesus ferg idea of 5% and 10% of my bankroll before going in a table or tournament after the bankroll is above $5

 

[sparky_rose69]

Love this Thread lots of good info. Thanks guys for the info
im still learning.

 

[dmorris68]

The numbers I surmised were among regulars and no I don't have any reason to believe it couldn't be as high as 1 in 4 or so. I do think that when you try to account for everyone who's ever played a hand of online poker the figure gets a lot lower. Surely there are a lot of people who flame out and can't afford to put in the semi consistent volume (without a couple extra mortgages on their house or something) that to me is part of being considered an actual poker player. I'm a winning player and most of my poker friends are winning players so maybe that's predisposed me to thinking that 19 out of 20 is too high. I still remain skeptical that 5% is the figure and still remain interested in any solid reasoning to suggest that it is.

Again, it really comes down to how we define the parameters. When we say "X% of poker players are winners/losers," first what are we considering to be a "poker player" and second how are we defining winning and losing?

In my mind, a poker player is someone who plays poker. Period. Fine, we can filter out the hit & runners who made one deposit, blew it at their first table, and never came back. But it doesn't have to be a player who grinds continuously either. It could be someone who makes a small deposit a couple times a year and sits down with his entire BR and blows it each time.

As to winners/losers, I tend to simplify it down to mean whether you've earned more playing poker than you've invested. I don't really get bogged down with sample size, because the vast majority of people who binked a big cash in their very first game and never played again is so small as to be statistically insignificant. I think the winning category also includes freeroll players who have a balance, because they're playing poker after all and to have a balance means they've earned more than they've paid in.

If we're going to keep moving the bar higher and higher in terms of what constitutes a valid reg, then of course the percentage is going to go up. Looking at CC members, If you eliminate all the freeroll players who have never deposited and have a zero balance, then I think that leaves a much more significant percentage that could be called winners. But if you count *every* CC member (presumably all of whom have played poker either live or online, otherwise not sure why they'd be here), then I'd argue it's probably back into single digits.

The latter part of your Hendon Mob article actually acknowledges that if you increase the inclusiveness criteria of your sample sufficiently, you can get back to those tiny percentages (note that I don't agree with 1% either):

Finally, let’s return to the definition of a losing player. In other articles, I’ve examined how many hands a player has to post to be sure of their performance. The answer was also surprising: in the hundreds of thousands. Perhaps people think of a winner as a long term, consistent and significant money maker – someone who may even make a decent living from the game. Returning to the figures above, only 721 Hold Em players out of my database total of 41,000 had played more than 5,000 hands. Of these players, 58%, or 422 were winners.

That is indeed close to the 1% the forum poster had estimated. So in a sense only that fraction of players, we could claim, are “winners”. However, it does not follow that the rest are losers, but merely that they don’t play often enough for us to make any concrete observations about their results

And on the flip side, if you really get tight on your criteria of what you consider a "poker player," it's pretty easy to demonstrate that more than half of players are winners.

It's not hard to believe that the % of regs who win is substantially higher than the % of all players who win. The thing here is... what % of all players are regs? I have no real idea, but let's say it's 20%. Let's also say 25-30% of regs are winners. If we simplify our model by saying no non-regs are winners, then we end up with 5-6% of all players being winners. we can change thesw numbers of course, but unless we change them quite a bit, the % of all players who are winners stays quite low.

This is pretty much where I'm coming from.

In reality, I'll bet we're all probably in close agreement here when we nail down identical parameters for what it is we're measuring. Some of us just have much broader sample qualification criteria, hence the disparity.

 

[DenverDave]

Getting back to the BRM point, if you are still working on getting your game improved, I would shoot for 100 buyins at the level you feel you can beat consistently. If you are not winning consistently, then 100 BI's at the lowest level possible. That is your apprenticeship level. I am still at 2nl, but have 100+ buyins and have been winning of late due to some changes to my game. I have been really focusing on putting players on ranges. And taking good notes.

Once I can either get the rest of my FTP money, or I build up my roll to 100 BI's at 10NL(Cabon does not have 5NL games), I will move up. I realized that with less than 50 BI's I was playing with scared money. Always worried about needing to pump my roll. Not now, I lose a few buyins at my current level, no biggie, I will get them the next time.

If I take a shot at 10NL, I will learn from my last venture: WATCH and get hands on folks instead of trying to bully my way to winning.

Good luck!

 

[dmorris68]

Honestly I believe maintaining 100 BI's at 2NL is a bit nitty unless you just can't win, in which case there's not much point to BRM anyway. Again, BRM is for winning or at least b/e players.

At the nano stakes I think 20-30 BI's is probably plenty.

If you're playing much bigger or depending on your poker income for food and board, then 100 BI's might make sense.

 

[pisant]

I see a certain amount of self-interest being displayed here. It is in the interest of profitable players to encourage low-skill players to keep redepositing, so of course some long-term profitable players are still promoting the pre-UIGEA 30% figure. That figure was originally promoted on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, since the poker sites did not make their databases public, and the only way to be sure what proportion of players are profitable would be to examine the databases of all major poker sites. The 30% dogma was promoted by poker pros, poker coaches and poker sites that have a financial interest in promoting redeposits by losing players. What really happened is that the poker sites and poker pros got together and hired some public relations firm to calculate what figure would be just high enough to maximize losing player redeposits while not being so high as to sound implausible, and they came up with 30%, and then everyone affiliated with the poker sites--including major profitable players and major US-based poker fora--were quitely instructed to keep repeating 30%, 30% 30%, 30%, 30% until it became folk wisdom and those who questioned it could be safely ridiculed. But then UIGEA came and you didn't have 30% of American poker players complaining that they were out a whole bunch of money that had been frozen on the poker sites. That exploded the 30% myth, and if people still continue to repeat it, it is primarily out of self-interest, but also possibly out of ignorance.

I also see evidence of ignorance and _recent_ inexperience on the part of some American members who haven't played non-US poker sites for the past three years because they're not legally allowed to. The biggest "spewers and donks," as someone here put it, were always Americans, who are wealthy compared to the rest of the world and can afford to spew and be donks. My experience on sites such as pokerstars is that the European and Asian player base on those sites is much more highly skilled and effective than the lawbreakers you'd probably find on Bovada. Those with experience on non-US sites will attest that even 2nl is much tougher now than it was pre-UIGEA. So people who keep chanting the mantra that being profitable at poker is easy, are simply living in the pre-UIGEA past and refusing to admit their lack of recent evidence.

Anyway, this thread has suffered from an insane amount of thread creep. My original question was whether I was crazy to give up tournaments because of the near-impossibility of finding out whether I am profitable at tournaments, while at cash it is possible to get a decent idea of whether I'm profitable given a manageably large hand sample. I"m satisfied now that I've got my answer. Thank you, all. In terms of the side discussion of what proportion of players are profitable, the only way to know is for someone who does not have a conflict of interest to hire a truly independent auditing firm that has real integrity and to have it examine the hand and deposit/cashout databases of all the major poker sites, and I don't see that happening, because, aside from the self-interested poker sites, poker pros and online fora, nobody in the world could care less.

See ya.

 

[DunningKruger]

You're confused about what the UIGEA is. That was passed way back in 2006 and obviously 30% of american players weren't complaining about having their money frozen (not to mention that implies that losing or breakeven players don't have any money on poker sites). Maybe some neteller users. Your post as a whole is an awful lot of conjecture.