TAG v. LAG style of play in MSSH (Cross-Post from SSSH Forum)

[kapw7]

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theres plenty of TAGS playing in one of the stoxtrader databases, stoxtrader himself is a 6 player TAG.

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How old is this DB?
I suspect Stox's TAG style is not good enough after how the games have changed. Of course this is just a personal opinion and might be far off.

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its not really comparable. stox was playing 150p/300p. i highyl doubt todays 10/20 plays tougher than that game.

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Lol yes. I was talking about upper mid to high stakes games. That I don't play of course.

[Victor]

stellar, your response is a cop-out. if you truly believe that playing 40/30 is more profitable then you should do it. defend blinds more. 3bet and cold call poor players from lp. call in sb vs steals with maringal hands like pairs and suited [censored]. its no mystery how to play more hands. you want statistical answers without doing any experimentation.

i would do it but i dont have money to burn.

[DrSavage]

FWIW my 200k hand database shows opposite results - average combined winrate of tags (vpip 20-30) is positive and average winrate of lags (30-40) is around -1.5 bb/100 (with players who have over 1000 hands). Of course this combines bad lags and with good lags, but looking at the hands of the ones with biggest winrates it doesn't take a genius to see how insanely hot they have been running, constantly getting it in with the worst of it. It's also not a correct experiment to look at winrate of lags with over 1k hands because those of them who don't run at least decent from the start usually go broke too soon to make it to 1000 hands. You just end up looking at the ones who didn't crash and burn right away and miss every lag who bought in for 30 BB, lost it in 3 orbits and was never heard from again.

[StellarWind]

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FWIW my 200k hand database shows opposite results - average combined winrate of tags (vpip 20-30) is positive and average winrate of lags (30-40) is around -1.5 bb/100 (with players who have over 1000 hands). Of course this combines bad lags and with good lags, but looking at the hands of the ones with biggest winrates it doesn't take a genius to see how insanely hot they have been running, constantly getting it in with the worst of it.

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What level of game is this? How old is the DB? What is the game like?

Mixing players under 25% with players in the 25-30% range destroys the comparison. Lots of players in the 27-30% range are doing well in my sample.

What filtering did you use for PFR?

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It's also not a correct experiment to look at winrate of lags with over 1k hands because those of them who don't run at least decent from the start usually go broke too soon to make it to 1000 hands. You just end up looking at the ones who didn't crash and burn right away and miss every lag who bought in for 30 BB, lost it in 3 orbits and was never heard from again.

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It depends on what you are trying to study.

There is no doubt that there are plenty of bad players in the world using every possible style. I'm not interested in them or their stats. They are just an obstacle that is obscuring my view of the good players. Players without 1000 hands aren't regular winning players and don't have well-established VPIP/PFR values. Excluding them allows me to eliminate a lot of players I am not interested in.

My methodology shows all the regular players who did well over a span of a few weeks.

1. Are most of those short-term winners legitimate long-term winners? That's the core of your objection and it is not an easy question to answer. Fortunately I don't care very much.

2. Are most of the legitimate long-term winners in my list of short-term winners? That's a much easier question to answer. Of course they are. It is extremely improbable that most of the winning players in the game happened to run bad at the same time. Furthermore even the winning players who are running bad should at least be on the list of players with 1000+ hands.

So where did the TAGs (under 25% VPIP) go? There hardly are any and the few that are present aren't doing well. It's hard to escape the conclusion that even though I don't know which LAG-TAGs and LAGs are long-term winners, there have to be some. They are hogging almost all the places on the list of short-term winners. More to the point they constitute virtually all the high-volume players. Refer to the original thread in SSSH where I present results for the 24 players with at least 7000 hands. The domination of LAG-TAGs and LAGs in this game is nearly complete. The TAGs aren't just losing; they've packed up and gone home.

[StellarWind]

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stellar, your response is a cop-out. if you truly believe that playing 40/30 is more profitable then you should do it. defend blinds more. 3bet and cold call poor players from lp. call in sb vs steals with maringal hands like pairs and suited [censored]. its no mystery how to play more hands. you want statistical answers without doing any experimentation.

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This sounds an awful lot like you are double-daring me. I respect you a lot but right now you seem to be making this a little personal. Your feelings are very clear but why not contribute some analytical ideas to this thread? This issue isn't going to go away just because we don't like it. I'm as heavily invested in the 2+2 style as nearly anyone but I also want to learn and grow.

Anyway you are not an idiot. You know perfectly well that my playing 10000 hands of LAG preflop wouldn't begin to prove anything regardless of how I did. All that would happen is I would be left with a confusing mess as I tried to sort out the chaotic consequences of making myriads of changes to my game all at once.

Finally you need to stop misrepresenting my position. I'm tired of hearing you say 40/30. No one I respect has those two numbers together.

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Many successful players have VPIP well above 40%. The ideal range seems to be 28-38%. Players below 25% don't do well at all and are largely extinct in the population of regular winning players.

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The numerical goal, if one were foolish enough to create a numerical goal, should probably be set somewhere in the low-to-mid 30s. Unless perhaps a player is truly outstanding, exceeding 40% probably means playing hands you shouldn't. That doesn't mean that players over 40% cannot be successful. They may just be winning less than they could win by trimming the excess. The numbers give the impression that being a few percent too loose is not a very terrible mistake.

As for 40/30, 10% is too low a call rate for such a high VPIP. You can't be raising all you blind hands. Completing and defending are part of the game too. 40/25 and 40/27 are much more reasonable combinations.

[cartman]

Stellar,

First of all hats off for having the balls to take a stand against the masses and defend it well. I don't understand your "LAGs are involved in more hands vs the fish than the TAGs are" theory, however. I go to great lengths to play hands vs the fish. I sit with them, I get position on them, I raise them liberally when they limp, I 3-bet them liberally when they raise, I defend my BB liberally when they raise, and I steal liberally when they are in the blinds. It appears to me that the extra flops the LAGs see compared to me are very often vs strong players--not the fish.

Of course they open raise more and therefore get to play more hands when it is folded to the fish in the blinds. But they also get to play more when it is folded to the strong players in the blinds. More importantly, however, their open raises get them involved in more pots where both the strong players and the fish 3 bet them. I don't know about you, but I am almost never happy to get 3 bet even by a fish because I simply won't hit the board often enough to compensate for the disparity in our preflop ranges (his 3 betting range is of course much stronger than my opening range).

The other major place they play more hands is from the small blind, particularly their cold calls. Again these are more frequently contested vs strong players than vs fish simply because there are so many more strong players than fish in the games.

What am I missing?

Thanks,
Cartman

[Silverback]

Stellarwind Are you datamining these stats or are these stats from players you are playing against?

If they are players you are playing against then I would imagine there would be less TAGS because you shouldn't be playing at tables with too many TAGS. (If you use any table selection).

Also, if your playing against these LAGS maybe you should look at your MISC stats and see if they are taking more off you than you are off them. Maybe these LAGS are exploiting weaknesses in your game.

Check your results against these:

Normal/Passive (31/6.4
Solid TAG (24.7/19)
Another TAG-like guy (26/14.8)
Outstanding LAG/TAG (35/23)
Another successful LAG-TAG (34/22)
Fair multitabling LAG (43/22)
Dangerous LAG (42/29)
Wild player (54/23)

[StellarWind]

My posts in this thread are doing two distinct things:

1. Describing what is happening. Who is playing and who gets the money.

2. Theorizing on why things are happening.

I'm having some problems with people rejecting the what because they don't like my ideas about why. I don't know why things are the way they are despite putting a great deal of thought into it.

Anyway this is one of the "why" posts.

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I don't understand your "LAGs are involved in more hands vs the fish than the TAGs are" theory, however. I go to great lengths to play hands vs the fish. I sit with them, I get position on them, I raise them liberally when they limp, I 3-bet them liberally when they raise, I defend my BB liberally when they raise, and I steal liberally when they are in the blinds. It appears to me that the extra flops the LAGs see compared to me are very often vs strong players--not the fish.

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It seems reasonable that winning LAGs do well not because everything they do is perfect but because they manage to do enough of the important things. Probably most of them are playing quite a few hands that they shouldn't. But which hands that winning LAGs play but TAGs fold are the important ones? If we could figure that out then we could add them to our games without assuming all the extra baggage the LAGs play.

I think the things you describe are likely to be important. If you have succeeded in capturing the LAG magic without being a LAG then nothing I said in the what posts has to apply to you.

Here are two examples of how LAGs and LAG-TAGs push TAGs away from fish. Note that I'm not saying that these plays are +EV or correct because that depends. They are just illustrations of how LAGs get more hands versus the fish.

1.A. UTG LAG opens A4s, fold, CO TAG folds QTs, two folds, bad BB calls.
1.B. UTG TAG folds A4s, fold, CO LAG opens QTs, two folds, bad BB calls.

This deal was played twice with reversed roles and the LAG got HU with the fish both times. The TAG did nothing unusual and would probably take no notice of these deals. Yet this goes on constantly when there are several LAGs in the game. The TAG can feel like he is suffocating because he never gets a chance to show his skills unless he picks up a great hand.

Right or wrong the UTG LAG was willing to risk an unfavorable matchup--being 3bet from behind by a sound player with a real hand--to get an extra shot at the bad BB.

2.A. SB is a tough LAG who 3-bets the top 35% versus aggressive steals and doesn't coldcall at all. BB is a superfish. Button is "cartman" with a hand that is a little below his default minimum standard (whatever that is). Button want to stretch to open because of the superfish. Button folds because the risk of being 3-bet by a tough player with a better hand is too great. SB is HU with the superfish.

2.B. In the replay the tough LAG Button has the exact same standards and ideas as cartman. He opens because cartman at SB doesn't pose the same threat.

Of course the LAG SB must pay a price for his play. Next time cartman may pick up TT and catch the SB 3-betting a dominated hand.

Once again the LAG has succeeded in keeping the TAG away from the from the fish. In this case he used his image. Notice that the worse the BB plays, the better deal the LAG is getting here. His risky "35% policy" becomes more worth it.

[StellarWind]

The overwhelming majority of the deals in the database do not involve me.

[DrSavage]

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What level of game is this? How old is the DB? What is the game like?


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Stars 10-20,15-30 and 30-60 over the last year. My feeling was it is the rough equivalent of party 20-40 skill wise.

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Mixing players under 25% with players in the 25-30% range destroys the comparison. Lots of players in the 27-30% range are doing well in my sample.


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I thought we were counting 27-30 as TAGs.

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What filtering did you use for PFR?


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None.

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It's also not a correct experiment to look at winrate of lags with over 1k hands because those of them who don't run at least decent from the start usually go broke too soon to make it to 1000 hands. You just end up looking at the ones who didn't crash and burn right away and miss every lag who bought in for 30 BB, lost it in 3 orbits and was never heard from again.

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It depends on what you are trying to study.


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We are trying to study if having a vpip over 30 in a 6max game provides better expectation than mid-20 vpip of TAGs. You cannot make a conclusion looking at winners only.

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There is no doubt that there are plenty of bad players in the world using every possible style. I'm not interested in them or their stats. They are just an obstacle that is obscuring my view of the good players. Players without 1000 hands aren't regular winning players and don't have well-established VPIP/PFR values. Excluding them allows me to eliminate a lot of players I am not interested in.


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And people who ran hot for 1000 hands will not help you much either.

You are approaching this problem from a completely wrong end. Take the players you have 7000 hands on with vpips over 30. Look at their hands. Examine their play. See how they defend, what they cold call with, what they reraise in position with, what they steal with. How they play draws, how they play monsters, how often do they end up at showdown. Try to see if their strategy makes sense. My research mostly showed that no, it doesn't make any sense. When i look at most of the winning LAGs, they always have WtSD of 45 and W$SD of 55, which given their VPIPs is just running good, nothing more.