How come whenever I go to a live casino it\'s the LAGs who win?
 

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.

Re: How come whenever I go to a live casino it\'s the LAGs who win?
 

Variance

Re: How come whenever I go to a live casino it\'s the LAGs who win?
 

Re: How come whenever I go to a live casino it\'s the LAGs who win?
 

They aren't as Super LAG as they appear. They understand how to appear to be "lucky" and hit their hands when needed. It is part act, part knowledge of their opposition, and part knowledge of the game. They understand the implied odds of hitting with rags. They understand how to isolate opposition and then play aggressive after the Flop. They only show what they want you to see.

Think Gus Hansen.

Re: How come whenever I go to a live casino it\'s the LAGs who win?
 

rbnn--

First, note that the biggest winner is reasonably likely not to be a good player. You might consult Sklansky's bit on why the guy winning after day one of the WSOP never wins the tournament, to develop your intuition for this sort of thinking.

Also, a lot of the best players play LAGgy live. In particular, the ones who cut their teeth online tend to. It's a good way to play against weak competition.

So, in short, the guy who wins the most tends to be LAGgy because the best, and the highest-variance of the worst, both play that way.

--Nate

Re: How come whenever I go to a live casino it\'s the LAGs who win?
 

I dont think this applies to limit, as 70%-90% of players at a table will see a flop depending on the stakes. In no limit if you are an ABC TAG player you need to open up your starting hand range and play the cards you decide to play more aggressively, at lower stakes sucha s 1/2 and 2/5 you will encounter a lot of LAG players who just throw money around with any two cards.

Re: How come whenever I go to a live casino it\'s the LAGs who win?
 

I can think of two reasons:

1) More Information: Good players can have a bigger edge over weaker players live, where they can pick up more information. This allows them to bluff more and play more hands for profit.

2) Variance: If you take 5 LAGs and 5 TAGs at one table, the TAGs will probably be doing better on average while the winningest player for that session will probably be a LAG. To correctly gauge a players winningness you'd need to see how they do over a longer period of time.

Re: How come whenever I go to a live casino it\'s the LAGs who win?
 

I always see these these super lags sitting on huge stacks at the table.. but then I remember that they reloaded their stack a good 4 or 5 times to get their.

Re: How come whenever I go to a live casino it\'s the LAGs who win?
 

This is simple

1) they pick up a top of small pots
2) they get paid off when they have the goods

Re: How come whenever I go to a live casino it\'s the LAGs who win?
 

I used to go on occasional jealousy tilt because I never seemed to have the biggest wins (unless I had the opportunity to repeatedly isolate hyper-aggressive bluff monkey and check-call him to death).

Then I realized that I was more consistently grinding out smaller wins and never having huge losses. Now, it's true that I probably play a more passive, lower-variance style that might not be quite as EV as I could play, but it's also a style that I am very comfortable playing, and one that I can abandon if I need to shift gears a bit to be profitable (although I might just look for an easier table if I find myself in that predicament).