The EV of different playing styles

[rharless]

I was playing around with my PokerTracker DB today and decided to do a little analysis. First the results, then a little explanation of how I got there (for those who like detail).

<font color="blue"> The EV of the basic four playing styles (full ring games)</font>
<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>

| Tight | Loose
----------|---------------------|---------------------
| |
Aggressive| 1.73BB /100 hands | -0.64BB /100 hands
| |
----------|---------------------|---------------------
| |
Passive | -0.33BB /100 hands | -2.91BB /100 hands
| |
----------|---------------------|---------------------
</pre><hr />

I was just curious to see this type of info. I know that tight-agg is the way to go, but I wanted to attach quantitative numbers to that. Note how disastrous "loose passive" is.

First, I exported all of the players from the "Summary" tab in PokerTracker and loaded them into Access.

I then determined "midpoints" for each axis, i.e. I tried to find a middle number such that ~half of the players fell on each side of the line. I do not necessarily think this is the best way, but it was the easiest for my immediate purposes. The midpoint results were:

Tight is VPIP of 22% of less.
Aggressive is PFR of 7% or more.

Next, I removed all players with less than 40 hands from the analysis. This was a bit of a debate for me. Typically players who have less than 40 hands in my database are losers, and I did not want to remove the players which make my database in complete a "zero sum - rake" database. But, I removed them because I think with less than 40 hands, "profiling" the players into one of the four quadrants is inaccurate. I chose the number "40 hands" arbitrarily by my feel that after three or four orbits, I can usually peg a player's style.

Then, for all players that fell into a specific quadrant, I added up how many total BBs were won or lost, and I divided that by the sum of hands that were played.

In each category, the number of hands played is as follows:

loose-aggressive 57483
loose-passive 68303
tight-aggressive 70026
tight-passive 50726

Generally individual win rates are significant when you hit 30k hands or more. I think melding all of these players' statistics into one theoretical "profile" player with 50k+ hands is reasonable.

Obviously, the overall results are "tainted" somewhat by my statistics (30k hands which fall into the TA quadrant -- and no that is not tits and ass). My personal results affect most directly that quadrant, but also probably the other quadrants to a much lesser degree. For example, if I were a very good LAG player, then the TP quadrant would probably suffer b/c I think that is the player profile who suffers most against a LAG.

I wanted to do a nine-box grid, with measurements for Tight/Average/Loose and then Aggressive/Average/Passive. When I split it up that way, however, it was hard to get at least 30k hands in each "box" so I felt the results were not significant. When my database is bigger, then I'll try that.

Just thought I'd share what I found. I expect some will think this post is dictating a certain way to play or prescribing specific numbers to shoot for, when really everyone should develop their own playing style. But, I think this quantitative measure of the different playing styles is useful.