I just found out about sharkscope yesterday, and I've been using my five free searches to check out people playing $30-$50 sitngos against me at FullTilt.
Some of these people have lost thousands of dollars. I'm playing against a woman right now who is down over $20k.
Is this disturbing to anyone else? Do these people have kids and families? Are they gambling addicts?
I am fortunate/skilled enough to be an overall winner at poker (I'm Booface7 on FullTilt, if you're curious). I guess I just never thought much about the people who lost money.
How do you guys feel about this?

Probably one of the worst threads in FCP history right here folks.

why.... its a legitimate question....

They lose so you can win

Most people who play poker lose (thank God!) How much they lose is a result of the stakes they choose to play and how often they play, and to some extent the quality of their opponents. if you're not comfortable with that, I recommend a game where money does not change hands.

Keep in mind that $20k for one person may be the same as ten bucks for another. People do play poker for fun, and some of them have alot of money.

There are some degenerates out there (thank God!), but unless you are a friend or family member who cares about someone with a gambling problem, well, live and let live, I say.

They were born rich, Silver Spoon and all, and are merely passing the time until they inherit the family business/daddy's money.

Feel better now?

Gambling addiction is rampant and insane when you see the statistics.

Also, its well documented that HubDub is a dick, so pay no attention to him.

This is a great question actually and the big picture looks bleak, but allow me to share my view and maybe it will give you a better perspective on the situation you describe.

The facts are clear: most people are losing players. When you add their online tournaments, online play, and live play stats together, it is a negative number.

The key concept is to understand is that there is a poker COST and a poker LOSS: They are two different things.

The woman or guy that plays five hours of online poker a day (on average) and is down $20,000 after three years of playing has an entertainment cost of $3.67 per hour. (3 years x 365 days x 5 hours = 5,475 ... divide this into $20,000) This is very cheap entertainment.

The guy that blows the same $20,000 in three months in a hundred hours of play has crossed the boundary of "cheap entertainment" unless he is very wealthy.

There are a LOT of people that play poker that have an indecent amount of money, so for them it is "just their entertainment cost".

Then there are the rest of us. This "POKER COST" is better understood as a "Burn Rate", the cost of poker playing per hour, as opposed to an "Earn Rate" which is a measure of your poker gain per hour.

Most people have a "Burn Rate" and you should understand that this is normal, because it represents the cost of learning to play better.

Basically, the model looks like this, you play for years and years with a small burn rate (hopefully small ) but this small burn rate adds up over time. Finally your skills come together and you start winning at your level and maybe bag a big tournament.

This is actually very, very common. If you check out the stats at www.bluffmagazine.com and look at the recent big winners of $100,000 prizes, most of them show a few thousand in net profit. This is because that big score erased years of accumulated losses. There is an ordinary player called vetiver that last month buried his burn rate in tournament play, and this month has bagged over $125,000 in net winnings. Here is a guy that has gone through the full cycle.

So most of the players that you see with losses are showing you not their degenerate gambling, but the cost of their poker improvement or poker entertainment.

You can take my case as an example.

I am sure my online ring play is terrible and I look like the world's worse fish because this past year I have been learning to play Pot Limit Omaha Hi and I play at the $1/$2 level regularly.

In tournaments look me up (and vetiver while you are at it) at www.bluffmgazine.com/pokerdb and you will see that I have a net winnings of $11,000+.

My live play is very high.

Also, I make a very good living and can afford a higher entertainment cost.

Put it all together and it is an earn rate, which sharkscope cannot hope to track. A year ago in March 2007, I had a burn rate, no question about it but last April my play came together and I bagged a huge tournament (well, huge for me I guess it was $16,000)

The bottom line is that there are real limits to what sharkscope (and other tools like that) tell you. A person may totally suck at live play, have negative $20,000 according to sharkscope for ring games, but have won a bunch of poker tournaments for $50,000+ apiece and end up a winning player.

In her inaugural video on www.pokervt.com Annette Obrestad mentions that on her site Betfair, the sports bettors who are clueless about poker regularly play in poker tournaments, having won money from sports betting. She says they are terrible players! These players are playing for fun and they just have a high entertainment cost.

I am not minimizing gambling addiction ... it exists of course but there is a balance out there between the winning players and the losing players that includes an entertainment cost which is legitimate.

Hope this helps. It is just my opinion and since this is a forum where we all actively solicite different points of view, I hope mine was informative.

Best of skill & luck in your games.

Whenever I use sharkscope for myself I see mostly losing players on there. A lot of them are down hundreds to thousands of dollars, and I see a few players in black for $70-$100. Nothing ever big though.

In bulk a lot of people who play online have no clue as to what they are doing it seems, but even then, that leaves a decent amount who do, are in the black.

So, for those who lose so much, they can be bad players, just spending money as much as they can to capture success they see on TV, etc. Or, they are running bad. Either way, if your in the black, your at least a different caliber of player in some degree. You have avoiding unnecessary losses by going into limits higher then what you can afford and the like, and your winning enough to get by.

Another point: sharkscope has some gross inaccuracies. It doesnt handle Steps at all properly, busto-soon was "losing" over 30,000 last time I looked, when hes over 300k winner in Steps alone. It also doesnt handle T$ correctly. It also doesnt have 100% capture rates. Throw in variance and sharkscope is a waste imo.

people also spend thousands of dollars on the newest and bestest golf gear when they have no hope of getting on even the canadian tour.

poker & golf have this similarity: any armchair athlete can dream of going all the way. the road to the dream is pretty bumpy.

I believe that those who lose a lot online don't really care about the money. Probably they have very rich parents or they make 30000$ per hour.

As a way of showing how much you care you could say "I see your sharkscope, it looks like you might have a gambling problem, here is the number of an agency you might want to call."

This may also serve as an effective needle

People spending money on golf gear can afford it.... people playing on line via credit, or instant deposits like echecks dont neccesarily hav ethe money, but there pride won't let them quit just because the money's gone.... online gambling is atorcious, and doesnt allow the money to become real to them until it's too late and creditors are knocking on the door, their checks are being bounced, or they loses their possessions such as cars, or houses. Worst case scenario their family has t pay the consequences..... Your worries are humane, and well placed. Alot of the people pushing the poker boom were doing it very greedily and I dont believe understood the full effects.... most poeple aren't gambling with found money, or owned money, they are gambling with owed money.

Online you can ignore the effects of gambiling adiction but live it's right in your face, I used to play in clubs with the same guys day in and day out and got to know a lot of them well and there are guys who destroy themselves and families.

One guy will always stand out in my mind "Tommy" great guy, good job, nice daughter but he blew off about $30K a year at the poker table, lived in a trailer, drove a beater and his kids hurt because of it.

I quit poker back in the 90s because of this, I just didn't feel right taking his money and money from others like him day in and day out.

Today with the larger pool of players I don't see it so much anymore but it must be there.

That's all.