Question about a difference between online and reality

wow bud a little angry are we. Well I don't have the oppertunity to play live games from my location so I don't know the difference. I work in Kuwait and put in 12 and 14 hour days. I just like to play a game every now and then ya know.

Dorkus Malorkus said:

no, you said they say that 1/3 of the players they rank have a positive ROI. there is a difference, as I explained. read your OP again.

maybe if you link us to this page it would help - i really can't be bothered trawling through sharkscope's site to find it myself.

edit: random other factor - rake online <<<< rake live.

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sharkscope said:

What proportion of online poker players make money from Sit N' Go tournaments?
1/3rd of the usernames are profitable. 2/3rds lose money.

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SharkScope - The Largest Online Poker Tournament Results Database

reb0202 said:

wow bud a little angry are we. Well I don't have the oppertunity to play live games from my location so I don't know the difference. I work in Kuwait and put in 12 and 14 hour days. I just like to play a game every now and then ya know.

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I'm not angry, but I felt the need to defend myself when one player says this is a worthless topic (so worthless there is an article on cardplayer titled "the differences between online and live poker" ) and another player basically says I'm making up numbers.

Notice Dorkus hasn't told us what he thinks the percentage of players who win live is.

internetpokerdonk said:

SharkScope - The Largest Online Poker Tournament Results Database

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Aside from everything else Dorkus and others have said, you do realise that sharkscope only does tournament results, right? It says so right there in the title.

So you can't actually use that for estimating overall online player win rates, as it ignores ring games altogether.

Unless you only want to talk about donk 'n' goes, in which case, why are you banging on about cash game tables?

OzExorcist said:

Aside from everything else Dorkus and others have said, you do realise that Sharkscope only does tournament results, right? It says so right there in the title.

So you can't actually use that for estimating overall online player win rates, as it ignores ring games altogether.

Unless you only want to talk about donk 'n' goes, in which case, why are you banging on about cash game tables?

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I don't think that is a relevant distinction.

Sit and goes actually require more skill than cash games, not less. You not only have to know the game to profit from them in the long term, but you also have to know how to work the structure.

I play many sit and goes in real life. I play a lot here in Florida in particular because our cash game buy ins are capped at $100. Who wants to play a 5/10 NL game where everyone starts with ten big blinds?

Consequently, I play a great deal of $500 and $1000 sit and goes live. I can tell you from personal experience that the same players cash in them over and over and I know of several players who make thier livings playing these sit and goes exclusively.

I think skill is exaggerated in sit and goes...at least live. That is that winning players have a greater advantage and losing players are at a greater dissadvantage. This is mostly because players who might have an average understanding of the game and might be able to break even in cash games have trouble adjusting to the sit and go format. They can't understand the tight to start/loose to finish winning strategy. Most sit and go losers play loose up front and try to build a stack and then tighten up close to the bubble to try and ensure a third place finish.

At any rate, even if you think that skill is not more important in a sit and go than in a cash game, I think the rate of winning players v. losing players should still be comparable between sit and goes and cash games. It really doesn't make sense to me to assert that 10% of players win at cash games and 33% win at sit and goes. That would mean that 23% of poker players lose money at cash games but by some miracle become profitable players when they buy into a sit and go.

Are you asserting that otherwise losing players have a better chance to win at sit and goes than they do at cash games? If not, then the distinction is irrelevant to the analysis.



For DORKUS- From the first page of a google search:

It's very difficult to say exactly what proportion of players are long-run losers, but it's probably somewhere around the 80% mark or even higher

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Poker Bankroll | webooks

I also found three articles that say that 95% of poker players lose money in the long term, but I only mention them to show you that there are pros who are even less forgiving in their estimates than I am. I would wager that more than 5% of players are long term winners. My range is 10-20%. I think that is an acceptable range. It certainly doesn't seem out of the ordinary and it isn't some number I just made up.

It would be far more ridiculous to say that 33% of players make money in the real world of poker. I don't think any respected poker writer today would tell his readers that fully 1/3 of them can expect to be profitable poker players.

dont forget the vig...
Only rake and entry fees are half of brick and morter. that will increase your roi every day.:deal:

internetpokerdonk said:

I don't think that is a relevant distinction.

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It's absolutely a relevant distinction if you want your argument to make even a tiny lick of sense

Here's the thing:

Wherever you're getting your live winner figures from, be it 10%, 15%, 20% of players, whatever the figure is - I promise you those "noted poker authorities" weren't talking solely about SnGs. They're just far too small a part of the live poker market for that to be plausible. You've gotta compare apples with apples.

Winning players could include players who lucked out and won a big tournament - I'd be 99.9% certain Jerry Yang is a winning player over his 'career', for example. Reckon Jerry Yang would be a winning player if you sat him in a $5/$10 live game for a year though? I don't.

There's equivalent online examples as well, naturally. People that freeroll their way into huge online tournaments and win big aren't unheard of, it happened at the latest Stars WCOOP main event. Point is though, your live figures include these kind of winners, and your online figures exclude them. Immediately we have a flaw in the data set.

As for cash games and whether we should expect the win rates at them to be different to SnGs, I've never seen data. Nor are any of us ever likely to, because that's not the way cash games work. But a difference in the win rates wouldn't surprise me in the least.

Why? You've said it yourself: you're a winning SnG player who's lucky to break even at $25NL online. Think you're the only one?

I won't argue that SnGs require specific skills - we could argue all day over whether those skills make you "better" than a cash game or MTT player, but in the end it really doesn't matter.

What I will argue, however, is that SnGs can be much more forgiving than cash games or MTTs. You mentioned "working the structure" and you're correct to - it's a big part of SnG play. I think therein lies your explanation though. There's no such thing as limping over the bubble and into the money in a cash game, and while the same thing can happen in MTTs you've got to play a lot longer to get there.

That, I put it to you, is the reason you can expect higher win rates in SnGs than you can in cash games. You might work the structure to put pressure on people at key moments, but others work the structure to grind out constant strings of third places. Take that safety net away from them in a cash game, however, and that player becomes a long term loser.