Is Tight Aggressive really the best?

[mtgordon]

I have always believed that tight-aggressive was the way to play. Numbers like 19.5/11/2.3 seem to be the numbers people say reflect a 'correct style'. Obviously you have to be using those numbers correctly, but never the less that's what people seem to be striving for. The only reason I question this is because I looked at my PT database and ran an auto rate with the follow rules for LA-A and TA-A:

ARI_10 6 LA-A
1 2 30.00 Vol. Put Money In Pot % is greater than or equal to 30.00
2 2 7.00 Pre-flop Raise % is greater than or equal to 7.00
15 2 1.50 Aggression Factor - Total is greater than or equal to 1.50
ARI_3 13 TA-A
1 4 22.00 Vol. Put Money In Pot % is less than or equal to 22.00
2 2 7.00 Pre-flop Raise % is greater than or equal to 7.00
15 2 2.00 Aggression Factor - Total is greater than or equal to 2.00

I would post the rest of the rules but the formatting is so poor that I thought it would just make things harder. I decided to look at the winrate of the various groups and I found that the LA-A had a higher winrate than the TA-A. Obviously if someone has hit a good run of cards they will appear to be looser and will have a higher winrate as well. To try and compensate for this I excluded people whom had less than 150 hands. I would liked to have exclude more, but I was trying to balance that noise with the fact that I needed to average as many people as possible. I will be the first one to confess that my database is certainly not big enough to draw a definite conclusion on this matter which is where you come in. Try importing these rules and see if you find the same trend. If not, then I’ll just take it to mean that my numbers are off. If you do, is there something to be learned from this? Should we (2+2 players) loosen up a bit in general pre-flop? Is this just and artifact of the data? Again, I’m not proclaiming that I’ve found a hole in everyone’s game or anything, I’m just wondering if there is anything we can learn from this.