Profit by position

[Aaron W.]

I've been wondering about this for a while now, and I think it's time I ask:

1) It's obvious that in any position but the blinds, a good player can have a positive EV, and this EV goes up as position gets better. But what is a 'good' EV UTG and what is a 'good' EV on the button?

2) When you are in the blinds, you should show a positive EV when you choose to enter into the pot. But when you include the forced bets, what sort of EV should a 'good' player have from the SB and the BB? How much of this depends on the small blind structure (1/3 SB vs 1/2 SB)?

3) Does anybody have hard numbers they are willing to share on this?

Thanks.

[Redhotman]

[ QUOTE ]
I've been wondering about this for a while now, and I think it's time I ask:

1) It's obvious that in any position but the blinds, a good player can have a positive EV, and this EV goes up as position gets better. But what is a 'good' EV UTG and what is a 'good' EV on the button?

2) When you are in the blinds, you should show a positive EV when you choose to enter into the pot. But when you include the forced bets, what sort of EV should a 'good' player have from the SB and the BB? How much of this depends on the small blind structure (1/3 SB vs 1/2 SB)?

3) Does anybody have hard numbers they are willing to share on this?

Thanks.

[/ QUOTE ]
u need a shitload of hh to even think about it.

[BigEndian]

I'm not knowledgable enough to talk specifically about this. But I do lament sometimes that my BB and SB would be a lot less worse for wear if I would just fold anything but an UTG playable hand PF with the exception of suited cards under 10. Too many times I find myself in kicker problems on boards that have to be played fast and furious.

For instance:
Q5os in the BB

The board comes: Q/images/graemlins/diamond.gif Q/images/graemlins/spade.gif 3/images/graemlins/diamond.gif

Yuck.

- Groove

[Bob T.]

I think you can sort pokerroom's stats by position, and you can find this information out. There might have been a thread about a year ago on this.

[ArchAngel71857]

To answer your question;

get poker tracker. you can sort by position. You need around 35K to 40K hand histories to even address this though. So far i make money at every position except SB BB and UTG, mostly because i have only played half as many hadns at UTG because of tables where UTG plays then leaves, so i become the BB.

My highest EV is the CO i think, but i only have 3500 hands in there, which is in no way close to what i need.

-AA

[Aaron W.]

I do not have anywhere close to enough playing time to be able to use my numbers as a significant data set. I also consider myself to be barely 'good'. But with all the people on this board who are 'good', there must be some signifiant amount of data to try to narrow down the trends.

For example, to address ArchAngel's being most profitable in the CO, is common or just random variation? Does it make sense for EV to be more (because, perhaps, you raise more in the CO than on the button)?

If people are willing to post their data (see 3 in the original post), then we may see something interesting show up (or it might just be stuff that most people can see intuitively, and there's no interesting information).

[ArchAngel71857]

I think the fact that i am most profitable in the CO is an aberration, when i get around 20K, i will post some stuff to give youa feel.

[Bob T.]

I just looked at my pokerstat database, which has 40K hands in it, and I concluded from that data, that I don't have enough hands to make generalizations about position.

[tj00]

Take a look at this site.

http://www.pokerroom.com/games/evstats/positionStats.php?players=10

[polarbear]

You could add all the numbers in the pokerroom stats in tj00's post, and take a weighted mean based on the frequency of the hands. This would give the average for all players on pokerroom.

It would be different for good players however, as they wouldn't play the same hands the same ways in the same positions, for instance 85 offsuit after 3 limpers.

The small blind is also a problem since we don't know what it's average size is.

[Nate tha' Great]

There's a lot of noise in that chart, but here's the average of EV by position, weighting by hand frequency.

SB -.160
BB -.223
3 -.036 (UTG)
4 -.002
5 +.009
6 +.010
7 +.016
8 +.020
9 +.032
D +.034 (Button/Dealer)

Note that UTG just gets killed here.

Some sense of perspective: the difference in EV between UTG+1 and the CO is .034, or roughly the difference in value between KQs and QJo, or AK and QTs, or 99 and 55. I imagine these match up pretty well with a typical set of hand rankings.

[Aaron W.]

That's not very helpful for what I'm interested in... This is a collection of data from *ALL* players (which includes the very bad ones).

However, this does show some interesting things. You can calculate the EV of each position (don't forget that AK is more common than AKs, so you need to weight the values properly!).

SB = -0.159
BB = -0.221
3 = -0.036
4 = -0.002
5 = 0.009
6 = 0.011
7 = 0.017
8 = 0.021
9 = 0.032
10 = 0.035
SUM = -0.294

1) You had better be getting a higher EV than these.
2) The negative overall EV is the rake coming into play, but you can't read into it at all because these numbers are (probably) averaged over different sized games.
3) The average player *does* in fact lose money in the blinds (quite significantly). The very low EV in the BB is probably people calling a raise with garbage. In fact, if the average person loses more in the big blind more than he wins in all the +EV positions *COMBINED*.
4) Don't read into the SB numbers too much, as this probably doesn't take only 1/2 or only 1/3 games, but mixes them up.

[chesspain]

I'll take every bigtrips/weakkicker hand you flop. I think I can make money with them /images/graemlins/grin.gif