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Separating the good from the bad Went to Showdown

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Now that we've developed measurements for preflop behavior and postflop betting tendencies, we can add one more variable to help us further categorize player behavior. While tight-aggressive players are generally the most feared player category, not all tight-aggressives are identical. For example, suppose a player plays only pocket pairs aggressively to the river, and does not play any other hands. This player raises at every opportunity, and always goes to the showdown, no matter what the board looks like. How would the autorate rules that we set up categorize this player?

Since pocket pairs account for only 5.88% of all preflop hands, this player's VP$IP would be very low, and definitely qualify him as tight. Since he raises at every opportunity, his aggression factor is easily over 1.5, and he is therefore defined as aggressive. However, clearly this is a player we'd like to play against—he's willing to throw away a lot of money on hands where he is not likely the favorite, despite his tight-aggressive tendencies. We'd like to have a third variable to help us distinguish between aggressive players who are solid (able to lay down a good hand when they are beaten) and aggressive players who overplay their hand (go to the showdown with the losing hand).

To further categorize aggressive players, we add the variable "went to showdown %" (WSD%) to our autorate rules. If we know that an aggressive player goes to the showdown more often than the typical solid player, we should be more likely to call him down. However, it's not clear what this threshold value of WSD% that differentiates solid from overplay should be. Our initial analysis of the hand histories of several winning players showed that their WSD% ranged from 27% to 36%.

Keep in mind that this statistic is meant to assist us in our play against aggressive players, but requires a large number of hands played in order to provide us with significant information. To illustrate this, suppose that we have recorded 100 hands for a tight-aggressive player. If this player sees 20% of flops, then the number of hands we have for postflop analysis is 20. It's possible (though extremely unlikely) he held pocket Aces on all of these 20 hands, and went to the showdown every time. In the extremely unlikely case that his Aces were cracked on all 20 of these hands, we will incorrectly label him as an "overplayer," even though he is more likely a solid player with bad luck. This unrealistic example shows that this statistic is relatively unreliable until we've recorded a fair number of hands for an opponent. However, as the number of "tracked hands" for an individual player grows, we believe that this statistic is extremely useful for deciding how to play against an aggressive player.