The Poker Experiment - PART 1 - Position Play

It was back into the database again to have a hard look at what the heck is going on.  I increased my sample size to include 1.3M hands from all poker sites.  I then had a look at the players that won or lost the most money and had highest or lowest BB/100 win or loss rate out of the sample.  Unfortunately I am not in the win category with theses players because these are the best of the best.  The difficulty here was finding players other than myself in the database with a sample large enough to have some degree of reliability. The players I decided to look at had to have at least 5,000 hands to be considered.  A larger sample would be better but what I am after is to see why the best win and why the worst lose.  A good place to start is win rates by position.  

The Winners

# Percentage Won or Lost by Position Hands  BB/100 Stakes SB BB Early  Middle  Cutoff Button 5207 14.84 $5/10  -6.78 -17.45 18.18 7.43 -4.61 94.49 5623 21.45 $5/10  18.75 -23.50 83.90 7.55 31.72 42.64 7844 12.87 $5/10  -2.06 -51.09 12.64 34.57 15.17 73.29 8223 12.87 $5/10  7.25 -12.20 -9.46 13.35 -9.38 90.67 10401 9.48 $5/10  0.00 -70.09 19.34 25.72 63.30 43.05 The Losers # Percentage Won or Lost by Position Hands  BB/100 Stakes SB BB Early  Middle  Cutoff Button 7198 -5.26 $5/10  -13.71 -21.79 9.24 -24.27 30.56 -5.77 7875 -6.01 $5/10  -38.39 -41.02 12.54 -7.66 34.14 12.99 8192 -14.48 $5/10  -23.68 -59.87 -3.17 19.12 16.18 -20.20 11113 -4.76 $5/10  0.00 -38.43 37.70 44.97 -31.01 19.17 12292 -9.36 $5/10  -27.28 -66.37 42.23 -21.91 13.81 27.87

The most interesting thing to note here is that even the very best players are overall losers when playing from either the SB or BB.  The losers category have even worse numbers from the blinds.  The winning players all have positive win rates from early position through the button while the losers have mixed results from all these positions. 

It is still to early to draw any major conclusions other than to note that regardless of your playing skill we all play too much from the blinds that result in poor results.  I am going to carefully scrutinize my blind play in the upcoming sessions to see if I can play less from these positions and boost my overall winrate.

In future posts I intend to use the same players from this sample to study starting hands, style of play,  preflop aggression, raises, VPIP etc. to see what lessons are to be learned here. The database software used is Holdem Manager.  I will talk more about it in future posts.

Stay tuned.