I’m not sure why you’re dividing by the number of people who try to play sport? If you include in your definition of “poker pro” everyone who plays poker, on average they are losing money.
I’d be prepared to bet that, counting “earner” as “someone with positive lifetime earnings”, the nth highest earner in sport is making more than the nth highest earner in poker for all n.
What you divide by just depends what question you’re trying to answer.
I don’t think we really want to know about the total earnings, or the earnings of a player with a particular ranking, as these would assume that you can capture some large fraction, or some top-tier part of the total market. On those measures, “all people” is the best pool to recruit from.
More interesting questions [if you’re trying to raise donations] are things like “what are the average earnings?” or “how well-paid is an individual with a certain level of extraordinariness?”. If you need to be a one-in-a-million soccer player to earn as much as a one-in-a-thousand poker player, then the soccer players are more sparse, more famous, and harder to recruit than equivalently rich poker players.
I’m not sure why you’re dividing by the number of people who try to play sport? If you include in your definition of “poker pro” everyone who plays poker, on average they are losing money.
I’d be prepared to bet that, counting “earner” as “someone with positive lifetime earnings”, the nth highest earner in sport is making more than the nth highest earner in poker for all n.
What you divide by just depends what question you’re trying to answer.
I don’t think we really want to know about the total earnings, or the earnings of a player with a particular ranking, as these would assume that you can capture some large fraction, or some top-tier part of the total market. On those measures, “all people” is the best pool to recruit from.
More interesting questions [if you’re trying to raise donations] are things like “what are the average earnings?” or “how well-paid is an individual with a certain level of extraordinariness?”. If you need to be a one-in-a-million soccer player to earn as much as a one-in-a-thousand poker player, then the soccer players are more sparse, more famous, and harder to recruit than equivalently rich poker players.
“If you need to be a one-in-a-million soccer player to earn as much as a one-in-a-thousand poker player”
But you don’t, unless you define “poker player” as “winning poker player” and “soccer player” as “anyone who’s kicked a football”.