Poker Software and Analysis

Abstract

Most Poker books, forums and educators recommend a tight-aggressive playing style. A study is performed to analyse whether or not tight-aggressive players tend to have consistently higher BB100's. It is found that there is only a minor relationship between player type and BB100. Tight Aggressive players have the tightest range of BB100 values, but the average is still negative, though insignificantly so.

Introduction

Following on from What Is The Optimal VPIP for No Limit Texas Holdem?, I had a look at the optimal VPIP for Fixed Limit Holdem tables.

Method

The same Java script from the previous analysis was used as a base, but withsome additional statistics and the player type definitions added.

When the number of hands is low, the BB100 statistic can be very volatile,as individual hands within the sample can have a large affect on the calculatedvalue. Therefore, the data has been filtered to only include hands from playerswith atleast 1,000 hands. This removes the worst losing players who blow theiraccounts. However, the main purpose of this analysis is to test whether or notTight-Aggressive players win more consistently, and the survivorship bias fromthe hand will not hinder this goal as we are not interested in losing playerswith short histories.

The player type definitions are the defaults used by Poker Office. MostPoker Tracking applications will automatically categorise players into the maintypes, and from what I've seen the Poker Tracker defaults were very similar tothose from Poker Office. The Poker Office 5 default player types are shown in atable at the bottom of this page.

Results

The data for this analysis has been filtered to full 9 seat $1/$2 TexasHoldem tables at Pokerstars.

Results are detailed in the chart and table below. The Mean columnrepresents the mean average of the BB100 for the given player type. LB and UBare the lower and upper bounds, defined by the mean minus and plus two standarddeviations of the BB100's.

Player Types

The aim of this analysis is to find the most consistently profitable playertype. Therefore, the figures we are interested in comparing are the LB values -the mean minus two standard deviations.

The results show that the most successful player types is Semi Loose Passive(pre flop) - Aggressive (post flop). However, there are only 12 players of thattype, and so we are unable to draw strong conclusions.

It should also be noted that most players are Tight Aggressive pre flop.This shows that they have a basic level of Poker education, as this is thestyle that conventional education would recommend. However, their post flopplay varies more. This shows that it is harder to play Poker post flop, asplayers are finding it harder to follow their teachers. One possible factorthat could be affecting this, is the fact that the later betting rounds containlarger pots. This makes it harder to play them psychologically.

On the whole, the average BB100 is distributed quite evenly above and belowzero. However, from observing the chart, it can be seen that as players becometighter and more aggressive, their range of BB100 values gets tighter.

Conclusion

The analysis has shown that player type cannot be used to differentiatebetween winning and loosing players. Groups of players with tighter and/or moreaggressive playing styles will have a tighter range of BB100's, but theseranges will not tend to be higher or lower than each other.

What this means is if you become a tight-aggressive player (as recommendedby many books), you are no more likely to win, than if you use another stylesuch as tight-passive. Note that the results in this analysis are only for 9player $1/$2 No Limit Holdem tables at Pokerstars.

External Links

• PokerFTP
• Poker Office
• Pokerstars
• Tableizer (used to create the table on this screen)

Poker Office 5 Player Types