Two Plus Two Newer Archives - How far has NL poker come? How far do we have to go? (abstract/long)

It is apparent to most people how much better the average poker player is getting. Everyone, from the average fish to the average high stakes pro, has improved drastically since online poker started. I don't think it's a stretch to say that there are hundreds of players today that would be top 10 in the world at cash NL online if they could travel back in time just five years.

Studying the changes in play over time has applications to poker theory. It follows logically that as play happens at high stakes, or more accurately at any game where the best players (who are also adaptable) are gathered, general play converges over time to become less exploitable. Also, players who are the best at not being exploited are likely to rise through the ranks into these games.

Measuring play statistics (ratios and factors of looseness and agressiveness for different situations, like vpip and %c/r river) of the best players in the world over time can provide clues as to how the frontier of applied poker science (ie the complete strategies of the best players) is moving towards the mean of unexploitable play. Lets call this progression of the best players' stats the poker science curve, or PSC.

There are lots of issues with PSC that limit its usefullness. Defining which players are good enough to be included in the final PSC is a very difficuly problem. Variance of specific stats are a gigantic issue. The presence of bad players dumping money into the games and adjustments by good players to exploit these weak players is also a big issue (when the best players are exploiting eachother, however, they are actually moving towards unexploitable play).

Each stat will have it's own PSC, but the PSC is the average of an infinite number of infinite curves (finite if time paramaters are given) for a given game or group of games. In that way, the PSC in a very abstract concept whereas the vpip PSC of 6max NL online from 2001 to present is easier to understand. For example, I think an obvious curve that would help players of ten years ago to see would be postflop agression in limit over the last 10 years. Some others would be looseness and agression in position preflop NL with medium to deep stacks (has increased a lot to my knowledge) and a number of cbet stats (I would guess these have been quite erratic but I think are finally settling down).

There are a lot of ways you could go with discussion of this topic, so let me try to provide a few questions to focus things. Assume all these questions pertain to 100bb buy in 6 max holdem from it's invention.

1. How far along are we on the PSC over infinite time? It's obvious we are in the early stages, but the final distance is much less important than the initial distance. In other words, how much will play change as people continue to get better? The variance of the PSC will decrease over time, because as we get closer to unexploitable play people will start to deviate less and less on average. Maybe we could use the rate of change of the rate of change of play to guess how far we are from "perfect", but we would need to account for factors like changing game popularity and availability as well as innovative poker minds who can help the community get over humps. Another imporant factor that is easy to overlook is the average understanding of poker theory. It is easy to mistake this for the curve itself, but one must understand that the PSC will continue to converge towards unexploitable even if understanding of theory stagnates.

2. Is it possible to use the PSC to predict future developments in playstyles? I think good players have gained edges by noticing small trends in other good players at their earliest stages, and incorperated them into their own game taking things a step further. A small example of this could be value bluffs, although this is still a somewhat contraversial subject. I think more players are making these thin grey bets now than ever before, and it has made certain players tougher to read. The converse of this is exploiting trends which are just hype or variance in the PSC. An example of this is some good players that make far too many value bluffs maybe because of stuff they may have read on here or from watching durrrr too much. Im not sure how accurate this is because I've only been playing mid stakes games lately (which react to but dont have much of an effect on the PSC), and because this is a stat that is hard to quantify (although you could quantify it) but there are other examples, like the various preflop trends that have happened largely on these boards.

3. How much variance is involved in the curve? The PSC can easily move away from unexploitable play in the short run because of many factors, but the nature of poker should always force it back. How likely is it that the PSC over a year actually moves in the wrong direction? Over one month? What about for individual stats? I would guess the answers as very unlikely, somewhat likely, and it depends on the stat and the time but generally they converge very slowly.

One last important note before I end this post: There has been a fair amount of discussion on these boards about playing exploitably to exploit versus playing unexploitably, and I have a feeling a lot of people will respond to this with "who cares?". Well, they may have a point on this post, but I think it is absolutely crucial in today's high stakes games that people have a good understanding of playing unexploitably (as much as that is possible), even if they dont spend much time trying to play this way themselves. Every time you deviate from unexploitable strategy, you are opening yourself up to exploitation. More and more people are understanding how to make themselves appear exploitable when they arent, and also at exploiting players who are exploiting third parties. This game isn't like RPS where one player throwing rock every time has neutral EV against someone playing unexploitably. In any pot that is heads up at a given point, the person playing less exploitably will win more on average.

Anyways, thanks for reading this rambling post, and I am interested in reading commentary on anything but especially the three prompts.