Darwin: or The Difference Between Winning and Losing

Just time for a short post today, but something caught my eye yesterday and I figured I'd pass it along.

Was perusing the 2+2 forums, and one of the the forum members there that I respect (in fact, he's the guy I hired a while back to review my PT3 stats) wrote a little analysis of player stats. Specifically, he looked at his last 2 million hands of $50NL full ring that he's played on 'stars and 'tilt. First, he looked at the stats of all the players he went up against combined into average figures. It didn't matter if he had one hand or 1000 hands on a player, they went into this group.

For this large group, he saw that the average VPIP for the herd was 19.5, the average PFR was 8.5, and the average ptbb/100 was negative 6.7.

He then filtered the large herd into a smaller subgroup of players. This smaller group were those players that he more than 100 hands of data on. Turns out that this subgroup had an average VPIP of 13.4, an average PFR of 8.2, and an average ptbb/100 of positive 1.35.

So what does this say? Well, for one thing, it says that winning players in his sample have much smaller VPIPs and have a much smaller gap between the VPIP and PFR stats. This isn't too surprising (i.e., TAG play is considered to be a winning formula), but it is still interesting to see real stats to back up the conventional wisdom.

The second thing that jumps out at me is that there is a survival of the fittest factor going on in his data. The players that lasted long enough to play at least 100 hands against the pro have, on average, winning ptbb/100 stats. The players that lose (i.e., have negative ptbb/100 numbers) don't tend to come back.

The moral? We need UIGEA to be repealed. Common sense says (and now the data agrees) that only good players are surviving. This of course means that the competition is just going to get tougher and tougher as time marches forward. Darwin in action.

Boy, how I miss the Party Poker days...

All-in for now...
-Bug