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what percentage of sky members are actually winning players?
i heard carlo saying the other night that if you are blaming luck for losing over a 12 month period, you need to take a good look at your game because you are obviously not playing as well as you think and that is is nothing to do with bad beats. I take it from this that the bulk of sky members are now reviewing how bad they all are. (i know i am) HAS SKY EVER PRODUCED FIGURES OF HOW MANY OF ITS MEMBERS ARE IN PROFIT ? (i doubt it) obviously this info is very difficult to get your hands on but according to the internet 90% of online internet poker players are losers. I don´t mind being one of them, because i love the game, but i do take offence of people preaching that there is "no luck in poker" all we ever ask for as amateur poker players (fish to the pro´s) is NOT TO HAVE LOADS OF LUCK but just TO AVOID HORRENDOUS BAD LUCK. I am sure that if you took all the bad beats away that the level of winning players would at least treble. I don´t subscribe to the theory that luck evens itself out. i believe decent players get their money in good more times than they get it in bad. to win a tourney you will always have to win a number of all ins, you will vary from being 90% favorite down to the usual 60-40 shot, how can you expect to win all these IF YOU DON´T HAVE LUCK.
regards terry the fish lol.
Comments
I imagine u will not get the correct % only a guess but just take online in general as a marker
the thing that seperates the pro's from the amateurs is reading a scenario. most amateur players will just go ahead and jam with aces, kings, queens, ak, aq, aj...i seen it happen loads.
the pro's are able to read ppl's play, get away from hands and exctract as much value out of winning hands.
i watched a cash hand few months ago, where a ljamesl folded kings to lolufold kings purely based on the fact he thought lolufold wud either have kings or aces, and seeing as he had 2 kings he would suspect it to be aces. how many amateurs wud just go all in and hope to get called.
luck is a factor, ppl run good and bad, ive been unlucky many of times, but i've also go lucky many times aswell. imo it evens itself out overtime.
I myself am something in the region of -£1500 or so over a 2yr period on skope , whereas i know this loss is catered for by my cash winnings and i have nearly £1k at my disposal for poker.
As you can see over a 2yr period =100wks or so ive grinded an overall profit avg of £10 per week and sustained it.
So though only a rec player i have to assume overall i am a winning player.
In a tournament, you clearly need luck, but once you have a stack, it's how you play that stack that sets the good players from the bad.
I have blown a big chip-lead early in a tournament (and we're talkinga a guaranteed top 10 stack here) by not playing my chips correctly. generally, though, I feel once I have a stack (which may take some luck), I can play it. Also consider this....once you have chips, losing races and 60/40s doesn't damage you in the way it does your opponent (who is eliminated) - this is why it often seems that the big stacks always get lucky (we forget their losing calls/shoves). I was leading a tournament last night and a guy shoved, I folded A 10, as I figured I may well be dominated (he showed K 10), a few hands later I called the same player's all in with 4 5 (still same sort of chip stacks each) as I knew I'd be unlucky to be less than 60/40.
Of course luck evens itself out over time, the cards/software has no memory, it has no enemys or favourites. Like you said, the winning players get their money in infront enough to A. Beat there opponents over a large amount of time, and B. Wins enough off their opponents to cover the rake taken from pots/prizepools.
I think the 10% rule comes from what Young_Gun said, most players will reach a point where they lose too much by not using proper BRM and therefor don't give themseleves enough time to improve their game. So they go off thinking poker is the worlds worst game and the next batch of players come who want to only play the big games and bust within a few months.
Winning players have used proper BRM and given themselves chances to improve their game from their experience, and have a much bigger advantage to the new players just starting out.
EDIT: Sporny makes a good call about sharkscope and satellites. I have played the £220 roller on a few occasions (never cashed - bubbled once - move on) having satted in for a tenner, yet my sharkscope shows -£220 for each of these tournaments.
But I have absolutely no respect for people who lose money they can't afford to.
I played for 2 years thinking i was the most unlucky player in history until i realised i was bringing all the bad luck upon myself.
Nobody no matter how good they are can make a profit all of the time but a good player will 100% make money long term by playing correct even with the luck factor taken into account.
Dave.
I copy/pasted this from the Sharkscope website;
One of the common - and more amusing - threads I see on many of the internet forums is discussions about what fraction of online tournament players are profitable. One of the most frequent guesses i see is 5%. Often someone will then post that SharkScope has in its FAQ that 1/3rd of usernames are winners. The person will who suggested 5% will then immediately claim our numbers must be wrong.
Why they think we would get this wrong I have no idea - but for psychological reasons players seem to want to believe the number of winners is small. The losers want to feel more justified in showing that they haven't won any money because its extremely hard to do so, and presumably the winning players want to feel that their accomplishment is even more special.
So what are the exact numbers? Based on our entire database 26% of players are winners. If you exclude rake, then the number is more like 33% of players are making money against other players.
The fraction is also surprisingly constant for the different tournament variants, for example if you filter for just heads up games, the percentage of profitable players is still exactly 26%.
The number varies somewhat by network, but not as much as you might think. For example take a look at the table below which is the fraction of winners for all players who have played at least 100 games:
You can see that most networks are grouped around the 30% mark. There are some tracking artifacts that effect some networks numbers, for example if a site does a lot of guaranteed tournaments with overlays or freeroll tournaments then this will directly boost the number of winners. The clearest case in point is the Merge network, which manages to have a huge 44% of players making a profit presumably due to all the money they are pumping back into the network in the form of their $50k Guaranteed tournament that often has a 3x overlay.
For some networks, such as Everest, we don't yet tracked scheduled tournaments and so the results don't get a boost from these types of bonus tournaments, if there are any.
Another factor effecting the winning percentage is obviously rake. We'd expect most of the Italian networks to be at the bottom of this list as they tend to charge significantly more rake than their global counterparts. Its still hard to understand why GiocoDigitale has such a small fraction of winners compared to other sites though. We can probably speculate about that until the cows come home.....