[pete fabrizio]

Just a small topic that I've been thinking about since I saw it referenced in someone's post. I'm sorry, I don't remember the author, but they said they suspect "tight" play may actually correspond to higher variance in PLO.

Now, I'm what most of you would call a "loose" player, although I might describe it differently: I play with a sense of urgency -- if there is value out there, I want to take it, and I don't have time to sit around and wait for the nuts all the time. BigDaveD seems to understand this style fairly well, but suggests that I better be prepared for some massive swings, etc. Is that true?

Of course, for this matter, we have to understand that by "loose," I don't mean "bad" play -- I mean a combination of aggressiveness and willingness to put money in thin - whether by calling in marginally profitable situations, making marginally profitable bluffs, or betting for marginal value.

While the hourly Standard Deviation for such a player is almost certainly greater than a tight bread-and-butter player, I would hypothesize that 1) It is not as much higher as people might think, and 2) The overall variance for that player, measured by ratio of winrate to standard deviation (CV for those of you familiar with ibanking jargon or with Mason's gambling terminology) would be lower.

On 1): While our looser, more aggressive player is putting a lot more money in in high-variance, marginally profitable situations, I think people tend to forget that this is somewhat offset by the fact that he is going to get more money in than your average player in low-variance, highly profitable situations. For example, that loose/aggressive player is often going to get paid off by people with an underset, or by someone calling his river bets (two intrinsically low-variance, high-profit situations).

On 2): Similarly, I think this "loose" player is not only slightly more profitable than his "tight" counterpart, I think he is much more profitable. This is because not only does he get the additional e.v. of all those marginally positive e.v. situations, his pushing those situations also gets him paid off in even better situations, as above.

And I think it is intuitively clear to me that the increase in expectation outpaces the increase in variance. Therefore, the C.V. for the "loose" player is actually lower.

While I have only my own play to back up this claim, my stats have supported it. I generally find my standard deviation is around 100BB/hr no matter how I play, and my CV is around .16 . While I don't really know how that compares to a "tight" player, I know it's much better than I could achieve playing limit hold'em (where I was struggling to maintain .09-.10).

Thoughts?