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How Many Loose Players Are Out There?

Wed, 02/17/2010 - 22:57 — maggie

Abstract

Using data from PokerFTP, a Java application was developed to analyse VPIP statistics at 9 player $0.50/$1.00 No Limit Holdem tables at Pokerstars.

It is found that 50% of players have a VPIP greater than 30%. This information could be of interest to serious players seek out loose players, as it is believed that they make easier opponents.

Introduction

Many Poker players seek to become profitable players by seeking out weaker players to sit down with. One simple way in which weak players are identified is by analysing their VPIP statistics. Players with VPIPs over 30% are often viewed as too loose, and other players will often try to seek them out.

Poker tracking tools such as Poker Tracker, Poker Office and Poker Crusher are often used to identify these players. The purpose of this analysis is to assess the likelihood of success of such searches.

Method

The data was downloaded from PokerFTP, and a script was written to chart the VPIP distribution and cumulative distribution. There is a potential issue in that a non trivial percentage of players are represented by insignificant numbers of hands in the database. The cumulative Number of Hands Played per player chart was therefore produced as well.

The data is filtered to only include hands played at full 9 player $0.50/$0.10 No Limit Holdem at Pokerstars. Further reports will look at results from other limits, game types and Poker rooms.

The VPIP charts were filtered to only include hands from players with over 20 hands of data in the Pokerftp database. While this adds a small survivorship bias and wide margin of error in the VPIP estimate, a higher minimum number of hands would have excluded more players from our results. As it is, our results only include 62.47% of players, which is not ideal.

Results

_b_50_100_pl9_r_PSdistvpip.jpg
VPIP Distribution
_b_50_100_pl9_r_PSNumHands.jpg
Reverse Cumulative VPIP
_b_50_100_pl9_r_PScumvpip.jpg
Reverse Cumulative VPIP

The VPIP distribution chart shows that most players appear to have VPIP's from 15% to 35%. However, this result is to be expected and of little interest.

However, what is interesting, is that the reverse cumulative VPIP chart shows that 50% of players have a VPIP greater than 30%. This means that half of players fulfill the VPIP criteria that serious players like to seek out.

Conclusion

The results show that there are plenty of loose players out there. So players who seek them out should not have much difficulty in doing so. They can do so using Poker tracking tools such as Poker Tracker, Poker Office or Poker Crusher.

It will be interesting to see whether or not VPIP statistics are distributed differently for different game types, limits, Poker Sites or number of seats. These differences will be analysed in further articles.

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