Guilt...

[bdawg31]

I think you just experienced getting a 'face' associated with one of the many losing players. Its usually pretty easy to not think about all the money being lost by people to make it so there can be winning players. But, if you really think about ALL THE MONEY LOST in poker, its crazy.

Think about some of the bigger winners that post here. Say we have 10 people that have netted 10k each on avg during the entire poker 'career' (that is probably a low number if you were to take the top 10 netting players that post on this site). That doesn't just mean that other players out there have lost $100,000 - they have lost a lot more of that to make up for the rake.

Now, think about when someone wins a million dollars in a tournament - that means that over one million dollars was lost by other players at some point.

That is a lot of people losing a lot of money. Maybe a lot of that is spread out over a ton of people losing small amounts, but i suspect that a fair amount is also made up of some players losing quite a bit.

Getting off-topic a bit - its hard for me to wrap my brain around that many people losing that much money. I guess since i have been a winning player, and the people i talk to are generally winning players at some level (i.e. my friends or members of this site) i literally can not relate to who is losing that much money. But, evidently people do.

Just like i can not relate to the way some of the people online play. Its like, at some point one would think that people would wake up and read one of the gazillion books and/or articles on basic poker strategy.

[Talking Poker]

You would think. But that goes against the following principles:

1. People are lazy.
2. People gamble to try to make a quick buck. People LOVE the idea of money for nothing.
3. People consider poker to be "gambling" - after all, any two cards can win!

And yes, the amount of money people are losing playing poker is astounding. Thanks to the rake, something like 2 out of 5 players are profitable, meaning 3 out of 5 are losers. That's 60%.....

When you step back and look at poker numbers as a whole, they can be shocking.