One third of the fish and maniacs are winning -- some PT stats

[Blarg]

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the "fish" are not winning.. they just think they are. and you do too.

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Regardless of what you or I or they think, I'm just relating the numbers I personally have stumbled across in my play. That's all.

And those numbers put 1/3 of them as winners.

I'm sure with time a lot less than 1/3 of them will wind up winners. But this was just a Pokertracker snapshot of 480k hands of 8.5k players, not of course anything more definitive and long-term than that.

[Blarg]

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I think there might be a few methodological issues though, esp re: your sample size for maniacs, as well as the discreet categorization

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Yes, I just chose a very simple way of assigning labels to play that I saw recommended here a while ago. Many people break things down much more thoroughly, and I'm sure these broad guidelines are better at classifying some game levels than others. I'm sure there is plenty of reason to prefer different criteria, but I had to start somewhere. Eventually I may get things refined to the extreme level bisonbison does in his "notes on notes" thread.

On maniacs specifically, though, now that I've posted my criteria, which I stupidly forgot to do the first time, you can see that every maniac is also a fish - just more so. They're a kind of sub-category of fish, then, and their small sample size looks a little bigger when you compare them to the bigger category they're a part of.

It's definitely not that easy to be either a fish or a maniac by these standards.

[Blarg]

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But on the other hand... put a LAG on a table full of weak-tight-passive players, and I think the LAG could take all their money

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This is a snapshot of stats from low-limit tables, none higher than 3/6, and not many even that high. These tables are full of weak-tight players.

Again, anything like this is just a snapshot though. Still, it is fair to consider, for those objecting to classifications being skewed, that there is no more reason to think that someone would be classified as too loose than as too tight, as too passive than as too aggressive. Doubtless, the extremely rudimentary classification scheme is a blunt instrument, but it won't tend to err more in any one way than another.

Most likely of all is that the errors in classification probably evened out. There are 430k hands recorded in which they're given a chance. There could always be more, of course.

I was not classifying who was a winner or loser, really, this is a snapshot of the present tense, who is winning and losing. The long run is up for grabs, and I'm sure things will change.

But we live in the present, not the future. 33% of the fish winning now is the reason they continue playing now. In the future, they will probably have lost all their money and not even be around. But who is to say more fish won't replace them....

[Rudbaeck]

I too made this mistake, but see ctv's post, he has the right answer.

These figures are consistent with ALL of them being losers in the long run, not with 33% being long time winners.

But we already knew this. Fish don't care that they are long term losers, they come back for the thrill of the short term win. Especially if that short term win is at the expense of a shark. They are bleeding, and they refill their bankrolls on payday. But they ignore this and go for the thrill of the one big win.

Everyone knows that the expected outcome of playing the state lottery, roulette or craps is negative. And still they do it. In poker it's easier to delude yourself into thinking you are a winner.

[djcolts]

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Everyone knows that the expected outcome of playing the state lottery, roulette or craps is negative. And still they do it. In poker it's easier to delude yourself into thinking you are a winner.

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Good point.

[Lazymeatball]

thank you for adding logic to this thread. Nobody said that Blarg thought that fish could be winners long term, he merely pointed out that some of them end up with more money than they started with, and that is why they will keep playing.

These results are skewed by short term sampling, and so are the fishes memories.

[FlFishOn]

What he said!

Give them 100,000 hands instead of 100 and you'll see 2-5% winners.

[Rudbaeck]

And thank god for that. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[Cosimo]

ctv talked about being a "winner" or "loser;" I think the important point is that 100 hands can't accurately peg someone as "loose" or "tight". (The point is very similar, but I didn't want to pick nits in my previous post, so I didn't directly respond to ctv.)

40% of the LAGs aren't winning. The players that Blarg has identified aren't really LAGs. The 3BB/100h winrate for "LAGs" is actually a winrate for people who looked LAGish over 100-150 hands. Depending on when you looked, the same player could fall into any of these pools. I've had 100-hand hot streaks, cold streaks, etc.

We know that the LAGs are long-time losers, but I don't think these stats support that. If you bump the hands-played requirement up to 10,000, you'd get a more accurate read on who the LAGs and TPs are (but you're unlikely to have that many hands on them).

The problem is that you can't classify people accurately without either seeing a ton of hands, or seeing their hole cards. Are they being aggressive because they had strong hands? Are they tight because the deck is cold to them? You can't answer that.

[Rudbaeck]

I wish PT had a stat for how often a person has had an icon change. My gut feeling is that it's very rare that it changes icons after 100 hands seen.

If we assume a LAG is a -2BB/100 player he is likely to have a SD of something like 20, or even 25BB/100. A good player has like 15BB/100 and the LAG is going to have wilder swings. So any snapshot of hundreds of LAGs is going to show nearly half of them winning over 100 hands.