Poker Articles

By Riley | Published Mar 16 2007, 12:01 PM
At the writing of this article, PocketFives.com has ranked nearly 10,000 online tournament players. Nearing such a round number, what better time is there to talk about percentiles? In the home profiles on PocketFives.com, we have recently added a percentile rank for every player's current Sliding PLB score. To really understand what this percentile means, however, we must take a look at the distribution of Sliding PLB Scores across all 10,000 ranked players:



The above graph compares the number of people who have low PLB scores to the number of people who have high PLB scores, where the x-axis represents a player's current score and the y-axis represents their frequency, or the number of players who are near that particular score.

The graph is a plot chart, using a series of almost 10,000 points. For the non-mathematical, it may then be surprising that out of a seemingly random, chaotic set of data points (the Sliding PLB scores of 10,000 unique individuals), a very ordered and structured curve is created. In fact the only visible separation in the curve is on the far right, where the scores of the top players literally separate themselves from the rest of the pack. If you look closely enough, you can probably distinguish the individual plot points that correspond to top 10 at the time of this article (seen in the console above the graph).

Another characteristic to notice in the above graph is how tightly-packed the lower scores are. Of the near 10,000 players we have ranked, 8,000 of them, or 80%, lie in the the lightly-shaded blue area, having a current Sliding PLB score lower or near 500 points and another visible 18% (those players lying in the 80th-98th percentiles) lie in the lightly-shaded green area. The top 200 players or the top 2%--those that are eligible to be ranked by pro pollers for the PocketFives.com rankings--are so elite that there is no room below the curve to give them a shading. Their scores remain fastened to the bottom of the graph, separated from the scores of thousands of ranked players below them.