PT only records sessions. In any session it would be reasonable to have a 6/4 split between losers and winners. Your total figure doesn't have enough data on the individual players to determine whether they are winners or losers, you would need 10k hands minimum. Put it this way, if you lost 55% of sessions long term - do you think you would be a winner?
Sorry, but unless I'm missing something (it wouldn't be the first time) this just isn't right.
PT tells you whether each individual player that you've ever played against is winning or losing during the time that you were at the table with them. It's nothing to do with winning or losing sessions (though obviously it will also tell you how many of your sessions were winners and how many were losers). This is the figure I was quoting - that only 60 % of players in my database are losing during the time I've played with them.
I don't need 10k hands on each of them to say this. I'd need 10k hands to say whether any particular player was a winner or a loser. Because otherwise I wouldn't have enough of a sample. But here I don't need a big sample of hands, per se, only a big enough sample of players.
Sure, some of the players in my database will have won more than they should, and some will have lost more than they should. But over a sample of 13,000 players, those discrepancies are going to even out. It's the number of players that's the key, not the number of hands.
The split between winners and losers doesn't change all that much however many (or few) hands you look at. I've just played 700 hands this afternoon - winning players on my tables (from their hands today) 43.5%, losers 56.5%. Last 30,000 hands - winners 42%, losers 58%.
As I say, the higher rake on tournaments and SNGs compared with cash is likely to make the split wider. And also there's the fact that millions of people have probably played a few tournaments, lost their money and not played again.
But take Laz's point and relate it to cash. Say 10 actual big blinds per 100 hands is a very good win rate (since it is). That's only just better than winning the blinds every round in a full-ring game, but is well in excess of the rake from one round of play (at low levels). And yet almost everyone playing is losing? Where's all their money going..?
Look at it another way - watch some of the people who scrape a profit playing low-limit cash, and think how theoretically badly they play - there's people sitting there playing 10/2/1.5 and still making money. Are they really in the top 8% of players..? I'm sure everyone who wins would like to think that that puts them in the top 5% or 8% or whatever, but ias far as I can see it just can't be right.
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