In this paper we study the reduction criterion for detecting entanglement of
large dimensional bipartite quantum systems. We first obtain an explicit
formula for the moments of a random quantum state to which the reduction
criterion has been applied. We show that the empirical eigenvalue distribution
of this random matrix converges strongly to a limit that we compute, in three
different asymptotic regimes. We then employ tools from free probability to
study the asymptotic positivity of the reduction operators. Finally, we compare
the reduction criterion with other entanglement criteria, via thresholds