Research

I was wondering: can super tight players really make a profit? Can you win by only playing the ultra-premium hands?

The reason I got thinking about this was a 2+2 post dealing with how you should play against rocks.

This is where PokerTracker comes in handy.

From my 5/10 data, there were 16 winners and 14 losers among players with more than 100 hands and VP$IP (Voluntarily Put Money Into The Pot) of 10 or less. That would seem to suggest that you can play super tight and still make a little bit of money. The numbers were similar when I narrowed and widened the number of hands requirement.

Let's take it a step farther. There must be some point where you're simply losing money by playing too tight.

VP$IP of 5 or less: 0 players in database
6 or less: 1 losing player
7 or less: 2 losing players
8 or less: 5 losers, 3 winners
9 or less: 10 losers, 7 winners

The only conclusion of this little exercise is that you can't play too tight. You're more likely to lose than to win if you do. In my experience, you need to fall near the 15 percent to 20 percent range of hands played if you want to be a long-term winning player.

Every winning player in my database (except one) with more than 1,000 hands played had a VP$IP between 11 percent and 26 percent.