Poker-AI.org

Are Today’s Poker Games More Aggressive?
Author: SplitSuit

Abstract:
A question I get quite often is “are today’s poker games more aggressive?“, and it’s a fair question. It seems like the average player is more aggressive than ever before, especially when you consider that only 5 years ago the games were incredibly passive. So I decided I would test some things myself and see if the games REALLY are more aggro, and if so…how much more aggressive? Since I have done a lot of poker database analysis for students I have a lot of databases and information on-hand. So I mashed up some databases and here are the results:

http://www.splitsuit.com/are-todays-pok ... aggressive

Note: This didn't quite fit into any other forum but since it's research and somewhat of a publication I stuck it in here.

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Cheers.

What I found VERY interesting is the change in number of players for the two ranges he compares.
2010-2011 and 2012-2013
# hands: 1.2M and 1.3M
# players: 43k and 9.5k

This leads to the conclusion that a lot more regulars are playing these days. His later analysis also shows that it's more aggressive on average, which makes it a lot harder to win money off of passive donks. Unfortunately he didn't analyze how the number of hands played per player changed and if that distribution is no heavily shifted towards a lot more hands (indicative of regulars). The average obviously increased but I'd be interested to see how top heavy the distribution is.

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Cheers.

That certainly ties in with my experience of online poker. I think the main reasons are that there are a lot more turbo and super turbo games around nowadays, which forces aggressive play and also there is a wealth of information and tutorials available, so the newbies are generally playing at a better standard from the beginning. The games have also been of a much higher standard since we lost all the USA players.

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www.bespokebots.com

The wealth of information is probably the biggest cause of this. Everybody has read a book about poker by now and probably watched a video or two about it as well.
Strategy is widely available now and people just LOVE to talk through their decision making processes (at least live) so it would be hard for players not to learn something from that.

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Cheers.

also every tv show containing poker, tells you to raise or re-raise, c-bet, barrel and so on.
So if you are new player, most of them already know from the very first hand, that raising is better than check/calling, C-Betting is a must...