How high percentage of poker players are actually in profit

Originally posted by midas1979
Does anyone know how high percentage of poker players are actually playing in profit...

Would be interesting to see, could not find any solid research online.

Hi midas1979,
Welcome to PokerStrategy.com EN community forums

It would be interesting to find that out. I tried looking for "net depositor" which is how "losing players" are named by poker rooms, but found nothing

Well over half of all players should be losing, some have suggested it may be up to 80%.

Sharkscope has some monthly leaderboards, which contain a graphic showing the portion of winning players in any given format in green, and the losing players in red. It looks like this:

This one says nothing about cash games, and it only includes players that are opted in, and only for one month and on Pokerstars in this case, but it should give you an idea. The ratio of winning players seems to be somewhere around a third to a quarter of the player pool in most formats.

Originally posted by Harrier88
Well over half of all players should be losing, some have suggested it may be up to 80%.

Sharkscope has some monthly leaderboards, which contain a graphic showing the portion of winning players in any given format in green, and the losing players in red. It looks like this:

That's impressive! Also good to know the data is out there. I'll look for it later and bookmark it.
It is to be expected though — if there are 25% of the field paid, it would make sense that the number of players in profit for those tournaments would be slightly less than that.

They don't show it that I can see, but it would be good to see the amounts won. I suspect that the 80/20 rule applies — ie 20% of the players are winning 80% of the money. That's just a guess of course

Less than 20% of players who play in casinos, probably less than 10% who play online. Those who play exclusively or mostly home games it could be closer to 40%.

There are two reasons

1) Rake - in low stake games rake turns break even or slight winners into losers.
2) Multitabling - online good players can be playing 4 (minimum) to 16 tables at a time. Thus one player in 4 profitable games is replacing 3 players who would have been profitable in their place if the good player could only play a single table.

Thus home game players are largely unraked games and they are mostly playing against other bad players which allows more of them to be profitable.

The monthly stat above as noted only shows players who allow their stats to be public and are for one month and thus will significantly over estimate the percentage of winners.

Please help-

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Originally posted by DeadZone7
Sorry, the video player failed to load.(Error Code: 101104)

Hi DeadZone7,
Which video?
I suggest that you create a customer support ticket Follow the link then click the beside "Open a new ticket"
Give them all the details you can, such as your username, the date that you tried to play the video, and most importantly the URL of the video that failed to load