Two Plus Two Newer Archives - How come whenever I go to a live casino it's the LAGs who win?

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Every book I have and virtually every strategy post here advocates a particular style of play, roughly tight aggressive.

And tight aggressive may well be correct playing 400,000 hands on-line, multitabling 10 tables for months.

But most of the time I go to a live casino, it isn't the by-the-book "tight aggressive" players who win. It's always someone who is playing some crazy hole cards too far and wins big; or someone who is setting up a worse fish by making terrible plays all night.

This is true both in limit and in no-limit. Even in limit, it seems to me the best players are the LAGs who read well, not the tight aggressive players.

Am I misobserving here? Is the sample size too small? Or are these books just wrong.

I just came back from five days playing at the Wynn and Bellagio, and every session, every game, the winner was some eccentric making weird plays.

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Most of it is simply that there are probably more LAGs than TAGs and LAGs have higher variance per time unit. Since there's a limit on how long a person can realistically play, that means most of the truly big stacks will be built by LAGs. A very small part of it is that the very best players are LAGs. There's no doubt that TAG is a fundamentally more sound way to play but there are very few live games where a great player can't make more money by playing LAG than by playing TAG.