On more than one occasion I've pondered where the money we extract from these games actually comes from. I decided to look through 6 months of pokertracker data and see what I could come up with. Your thoughts and comments are welcome and appreciated.

The sample: July - December 2006 100NL UB -> 81,846 hands.
Unique players: 4,503
Winners / Losers: 1,802 / 2,701 (40% / 60%)
Average win rate: -3.18 PTBB / 100
Total $ Won: -$45843.58
(Turns out this works out to almost exactly what PT reports for rake)
Total rake: $45,871.25

Ok, that all makes sense, as a our group of players is loser equal to the rake. Exactly what we would expect from a zero-sum event. Now I add a filter of 2,500 hands to the same data.

Unique Players: 26 (Wow, 99.4% of players get filtered out here. For reference, I played 32K of the 82K hands in this sample, and the 2nd most active player played 20k hands)
Winners / Losers: 13 /13 (50% / 50%)
Average win rate: 0.48 PTBB / 100
Total $ Won: $1,400.72

Now we have established that the less frequent players have contributed $47,244.30 to our game. Now let's shift the other way in our filter. Let's examine players how have less than 100 hands in our sample.

Unique players: 3,077
Winners / Losers: 1,161 / 1916 (38% / 62%)
Average win rate: -14.95 PTBB / 100
Total $ Won: -$33,940.19 (72% of all the losses)

And finally, let's drop our filter to 50 hands or less.

Unique players: 2,161
Winners / Losers: 765 / 1,396 (35% / 65%)
Average win rate: -27.64 PTBB / 100
Total $ Won: -$26,320.70 (56% of all the losses)

These results were truly eye opening to me. 72% of the money flow comes from people who lose all they can stomach within 100 hands. An astounding 56% of the money comes from a group that doesn't even make it 5 rounds.

That donk you always play with regularly 4 times a week ... he's actually only small potatoes in terms of contributing money to the game.

Here's the usefull idea I've taken away from this. We've all played with some of these aweful players. Everyone is trying to get involved with them before they go broke. I realize now that there is no need to go out of my way to play pots with them. The are going to lose to someone, but that someone doesn't have to be me. Their money flowing into our game is all that actually matters. That flow of money is what makes the average players, that we can beat, small winners. And small winners keep playing and redistributing the windfalls they get from these truly aweful stop, drop, and leave players.