In the early stages of their poker careers, many players spend a lot of time trying to figure out what ‘style’ of poker they should play. They start out being vaguely aware of the concepts of ‘tight’ and ‘loose’ play, and begin to become conscious of what each type of player might look like. Generally these ideas morph into concepts of ‘TAG’ (tight-aggressive) and ‘LAG’ (loose-aggressive) play, once the player becomes aware of the advantages that aggression brings with it.
When we get to a certain point, however, we start to wonder where the line is between the two, and how we might distinguish between them. We also begin to wonder whether there might be a case for suggesting any one strategy to be ‘correct’ in some sense – perhaps we’ll experiment with different styles and approaches, and try to measure the results of each in terms of ROI or EVbb/100. But this can never really capture the key difference between the two – in order to do that, we need to dig a little deeper.
Analysing data to arrive at these conclusions
Over the course of my five years as a professional poker player, I’ve played over five million hands and amassed multiple large databases on Holdem Manager 2 and PokerTracker. My most recent database contains all 350,000 hands I’ve played so far in 2016, while I also have databases containing my hands from 2015 and earlier.
The trend among these databases is that as time has gone on, my play has become looser and more aggressive, as you perhaps might expect. My VPIP and PFR have gone up from something like 16/14 in the early days of my career, to somewhere around 20/16 today. However, another interesting thing has changed, and that’s the relationship between my showdown winnings and my non-showdown winnings. These are represented by the blue and red lines on HM2’s graphs respectively, if you want to take a look at your own.
My blue line, as expected, goes solidly upwards in all databases. After all, we expect to make money at showdown, considering that includes the times where we get value from a big hand. What’s interesting is the relationship between the two lines, and the contrasts I noticed between the different databases. In the early days, I was playing tighter, and in the later days, I’ve been playing looser, and my blue and red lines have changed as a result. Let’s take a look at each style and how the blue and red lines shape up.
The TAG style: conservative, but effective
In the past, the TAG style was how many people played. A fairly straightforward, ‘ABC’ style of poker, based on playing good hands and playing them fast. This strategy was very good at capitalising on the weaknesses of many opponents at this time, and it worked well for me early on in my career.
The foundation of the TAG style is a reliable upward trend in showdown winnings, grounded in a focus on getting value from big hands and winning big pots every time our opponent has a second-best hand. The blue line goes steadily upwards, but as a result of the effect of blinds and antes, we also have to deal with the fact that the red line goes steadily downwards.
As long as the blue line goes up enough to put the orange line (the EVbb/100 winnings) in the positive, this isn’t a big deal, but it’s never nice to look at our winrates in the big blind and small blind and see we’re not doing much better than if we folded every hand, or to see we’re only barely above breakeven in early position.
This style is great when we’re running good – it guarantees we don’t punt off stacks very often, and it occasionally sacrifices small edges to preserve chips for when a good spot comes along. It’s a lower-variance style in some ways, but not in others – it relies upon us making a good hand in order for us to win pots. Thus, it’s restrictive in its capacity for success, since we’re only going to get good hands every so often. Eventually, we need to evolve.
The LAG style: aggressive, but more difficult
Once we do evolve, we might find ourselves playing a more ‘LAG’ style. We play more hands, we flat-call more preflop, and get more creative postflop than we usually would. We make more two-barrel and three-barrel bluffs, we make more check-raises, and we generally put more chips into the pot on average than we would when playing tighter.
When we play a more LAG style, our red line is likely to trend downwards at a much slower rate than it otherwise would – we pick up a lot more pots without showdown. As such, we don’t rely on being dealt a big hand in order to win the pot, which serves to reduce the variance caused by playing bigger pots on average.
However, the trend in our blue line is what will make or break this strategy. If we play smart, effective LAG poker, we’ll see our showdown winnings trend upwards at an even faster rate, as other players become more and more inclined to pay us off when we do make a big hand. On the other hand, if we find ourselves making mistakes and bluffing in bad spots, it may turn out that our blue line actually levels out, or at least begins to fluctuate as our habit of playing big pots results in a few stacks being punted off unnecessarily.
This ends up with us compensating for our lost showdown winnings by reducing our non-showdown losses, but if we do that we’re not really any better off than we would be if we played a TAG style. What we want is to become good enough at understanding other players’ ranges that we can make high-level decisions as to when to bluff and when not to bluff, with the intent of playing loose enough that we still get paid off when we have a big hand and loose enough that we can still pick up pots without showdown regularly, but not so loose that we lose all ability to bluff altogether. After all, the reality that we can’t be dealt a big hand that often remains true.
Which one is better?
We arrive at the question, therefore, of which style is inherently more effective. You might be thinking along the same lines as many others at this point, which is that the TAG style is more effective towards the beginning of one’s career, while the LAG style becomes more effective as our ability to read opponents’ ranges gets better, and you’d certainly be half-correct.
However, the problem here is that we’ve massively over-simplified the game by reducing it to two binary strategies. For one thing, different tables and opponents require different styles, but for another, it’s really impossible to denote specifically where one strategy ends and another begins. There’s no specific point at which TAG becomes LAG (although if you wanted to draw an arbitrary line, you might say that a 20% VPIP might be the cutoff point in nine-handed play).
What we need to do is to avoid putting specific labels on our strategy. We should recognize that there is a theoretical solution to every poker situation that results in us making the absolute most profit possible based on our opponent’s strategy (which is to say, there is always a way for us to employ a maximally exploitative strategy), and we should always be looking to define our approach in terms of how it relates to this strategy.
In some specific instances, the situation will require bluffing the river with 100% of our range. In some spots, it will require folding QQ preflop. But while a macro-level perspective on the game can be useful in many instances, it can be a huge mistake to go into a certain tournament planning to play more aggressively, or planning to play more tightly. There are only certain very specific instances in which we can say ahead of time what our strategy should be.
Thus, neither of these strategies is really better than the other. They both have advantages and disadvantages which have effects on the blue line and red line on our graph. Our goal should be to treat each situation differently and play the best we can, one hand at a time, one decision at a time, in order to produce the best-looking orange line that we possibly can.
One hand at a time, one decision at a time. Everything else is just background noise.