What fraction of online poker players are winners?
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:
| Network | % Profitable Players |
|---|---|
| Merge | 44% |
| Cereus | 39% |
| B2B | 33% |
| Cake | 32% |
| Party | 32% |
| Ongame.it | 31% |
| Everest | 31% |
| Sky | 31% |
| PKR | 30% |
| PokerStars.it | 29% |
| IPN | 28% |
| SvenskaSpel | 27% |
| PokerStars | 27% |
| Pacific | 27% |
| PokerClub | 26% |
| Betfair | 25% |
| Ongame | 25% |
| FullTilt | 25% |
| iPoker | 24% |
| CryptoLogic | 23% |
| Peoples | 22% |
| iPoker.it | 20% |
| GiocoDigitale | 17% |
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.....
Check out our Online Poker's 100 biggest losers article for some more interesting data.
Comments
These numbers definitely depend on how you look at them. Whilst a high number is clearly a good thing for your chances of making money on that network, if you are a good player, a low number doesn't necessarily mean the opposite, as you could argue there is simply a higher proportion of fish on that network.
Great stuff dude, its very interesting to see, is there any chance you can show not just winning players because some people may come play 5 games n leave but like stats of players who have played 500 games or more. Or maybe break down a couple of the more famous sites IE stars n tilt to show each stake or difference between stts and mtt sngs on each site. Probably to much work but it is interesting to see. I don't really know what to make of it, I kind of like the idea of sites where there are fewer winning players meaning more fish so the winning players win more than winning players on a site like merge where the wealth is spread out around the high % of winning players but on something like GiocoDigitale I have always noticed that winning players normaly win ALOT on this site and loosing players all loose alot, there are no middle men your either good or your not.Fulltilt seems good enough for me at the moment because I feel there is quite a big devide in the level of play in winning players and loosing players.
Hopefully see more stuff from you in the future.
RYHUNDO
Giocodigitale is plenty of fishes, I can assure... and as soon as someone becomes good, he leaves that platform to go into another platform with better software. Giocodigitale, infact, has fixed-window tables and it's not good for multitabling since tables that need user interaction don't come in front with the right order. I started on Giocodigitale and stayed there when I played very bad. When I studied, learned and needed multitabling, I left Giocodigitale, went on Pokerstars.it and became a winning player.
There is a big difference in being a "winning player" and a "profitable player"!
You could be profitable with a 50.1% win average!
That dont make you a winner! Just profitable!
SAYS THE GUY WITH 99.66% win average on FULL TILT for 2009
SO YOU TELL ME
i love the way magik randomly rages. hes obviously suffering from variance atm and needs somwhere to vent it. I suggest your nearest dart board, priceless ming vase, or girlfriend's heart ( even better if its someone else's girlfriend).
nice eye opener. I always thought it was closer to the 20% mark, but there you go!
I would be very interested to see how this works for winner takes all tourneys/sngs
im surprised ipoker is one of the lowest.. that site is fishy as