Player Types, Measured

The bestiary

Eight measured types, and the animal each one behaves like

REGVPIP−PFR gap < 10 — takes the initiative14,322 players · −4.9 bb/100

Reg · AggroGreat white

WWSF ≥ 46 · −3.2 bb/100

Hunts, closes, finishes. Wins the flops he chose to see — the closest thing the pool has to a winner.

Reg · PassiveHammerhead

WWSF < 46 · −8.5 bb/100

Cruises wide, scans forever, commits rarely. Solid before the flop and gone after it.

Reg · NitNurse shark

VPIP < 22 · −3.8 bb/100

Lies on the bottom and lets food come to it. Cheap, patient, and easy to fold to.

FISHVPIP−PFR gap ≥ 10 — plays along20,797 players · −30.7 bb/100

Fish · NitClownfish

VPIP < 24 · PFR < 14 · −14.1 bb/100

Small, timid, never leaves the anemone. The cheapest way to be a losing player.

Fish · AggroPiranha

VPIP < 50 · gap < 20 · −23.6 bb/100

Plays wide but takes the initiative with it. Bites first — which, among fish, is the least bad plan.

Fish · PassiveCarp

VPIP < 50 · gap ≥ 20 · −33.2 bb/100

Placid, enormous mouth, hoovers everything and fights for none of it. The classic station.

Fish · WhaleWhale

VPIP ≥ 50 · −62.9 bb/100

Plays every hand there is. The single biggest source of money in any pool.

Reg-fishRemora

PFR < 15 · limp < 5 · gap 10–13 · −12.1 bb/100

The sucker-fish that swims with the sharks and never hunts. Learned where to be; never learned to attack.

What we asked the data

Everyone knows the words: TAG, LAG, nit, station, whale. Nobody ever checked them. So we took every player with at least 2,000 hands — 44,713 of them across GG, PokerStars, iPoker and 888 — and measured everything they do: how often they play, raise, 3-bet, limp, bet each street, fold to pressure, reach showdown, win pots. Winrate never builds the map. It is only the exam the map has to pass.

There are no player types — there is one mountain

If you plotted every player, you would not see islands. You would see one peak and a very large, very flat plain.

You have to plot the right thing to see it. A map coloured by winrate shows the terrain’s relief — where money is made and lost. It cannot show islands, because an island is a crowd, not an altitude. So: the same space, coloured by how many players stand there.

The line between the families is the gap, not VPIP

How much of what you play, you play without raising. That one number does more work than any other in this study.

The reg box already uses it — its own ceiling is a VPIP−PFR gap of 10 — and running that same threshold over the whole pool splits it cleanly in two. The gap sweep below has no elbow (nothing here does), but 10 is where the taxonomy and the data agree, and the limp column is why:

Notice what the gap line is not: a valley in the density map. The gap histogram is one smooth hump peaking at 4 — no dip at 10, no dip anywhere. The line is real in behaviour and real in money, and invisible in population. That is the whole lesson of this article in one stat.

Part one — how we sort the regs

Inside the disciplined family, the question is no longer how much you play. It is what happens after the flop.

We put five candidate axes into the same contest: take the bottom and top tenth of each stat, and see how far apart their winrates land. One axis wins clearly, and it is not the one you would guess from the vocabulary:

So the reg family splits on WWSF 46, and on nothing else. One line, one stat, three types — with the nit corner carved out by VPIP first, because a player who never enters a pot cannot be judged on what he does in one.

The three regs

Styles partition the reg family · 44,713 players · ≥2,000 hands · 4 rooms · No-Ante NLHE cash · August 2026

REG · split on WWSF alone · shipped	In plain words	Definition	Share of family	bb/100
Aggro	wins the flops he sees	WWSF ≥ 46	45.9%	−3.23
Nit	waits for the goods	VPIP < 22	24.9%	−3.84
Passive	solid preflop, gives up too many pots	WWSF < 46	29.2%	−8.45

REGVPIP−PFR gap < 10 — takes the initiative14,322 players · −4.9 bb/100

Reg · AggroGreat white

WWSF ≥ 46 · −3.2 bb/100

Hunts, closes, finishes. Wins the flops he chose to see — the closest thing the pool has to a winner.

Reg · PassiveHammerhead

WWSF < 46 · −8.5 bb/100

Cruises wide, scans forever, commits rarely. Solid before the flop and gone after it.

Reg · NitNurse shark

VPIP < 22 · −3.8 bb/100

Lies on the bottom and lets food come to it. Cheap, patient, and easy to fold to.

Part two — how we sort the fish

The same contest, run inside the other family, returns a completely different winner. This is the finding that broke our own taxonomy.

VPIP is king, and the cliff it draws is the only natural boundary in the entire population.

A second break is exactly the kind of thing an eye finds and a slope confirms — or refutes. This one survives the only test that matters: it reappears, independently, in all four rooms.

Below the whale line, what remains is the gap again — the same axis that separated the families, still working inside one of them.

Where to draw the tight-fish line

We drew it at VPIP 24. The habit in the poker world is 30. Here the data does take a side.

Extend the box from 24 to 30 and it grows by 2,366 players — who lose −20.0 bb/100 against the −10.2 of the ones already inside. You would be merging a group that loses twice as much into a type whose entire point is that it is the cheapest way to be bad. Two animals, not one animal at two intensities. And 1,424 of those 2,366 already qualify as ordinary fish through their limping, so moving the line mostly re-labels players who are already covered.

The four fish

Styles partition the fish family · 44,713 players · ≥2,000 hands · 4 rooms · No-Ante NLHE cash · August 2026 · proposed

FISH · split on VPIP then gap · proposed	In plain words	Definition	Share of family	bb/100
Nit	tight but timid — the cheapest mistakes	VPIP < 24 · PFR < 14	5.8%	−14.1
Aggro	plays wide but raises	VPIP < 50 · gap < 20	49.4%	−23.6
Passive	plays wide and calls	VPIP < 50 · gap ≥ 20	31.2%	−33.2
Whale	plays everything	VPIP ≥ 50	13.6%	−62.9

FISHVPIP−PFR gap ≥ 10 — plays along20,797 players · −30.7 bb/100

Fish · NitClownfish

VPIP < 24 · PFR < 14 · −14.1 bb/100

Small, timid, never leaves the anemone. The cheapest way to be a losing player.

Fish · AggroPiranha

VPIP < 50 · gap < 20 · −23.6 bb/100

Plays wide but takes the initiative with it. Bites first — which, among fish, is the least bad plan.

Fish · PassiveCarp

VPIP < 50 · gap ≥ 20 · −33.2 bb/100

Placid, enormous mouth, hoovers everything and fights for none of it. The classic station.

Fish · WhaleWhale

VPIP ≥ 50 · −62.9 bb/100

Plays every hand there is. The single biggest source of money in any pool.

Bonus — the tenth of the pool with no name

A map is also defined by what falls off it. What fell off ours is the most recognisable player in modern online poker.

Run every box over the cohort and 4,552 players — 10.2% — match nothing. They are not noise and they are not exotic:

The reg-fish, measured

Median profile of each group · 44,713 players · ≥2,000 hands · 4 rooms · No-Ante NLHE cash · August 2026 · bb/100 also shown centred on each player's own room

Group	Players	VPIP	PFR	Gap	Limp %	WWSF	AF	bb/100	vs room
REG	14,322	24.4	18.8	5.2	0.6	46.5	2.24	-4.9	+10.3
Reg-fish	4,552	25.8	14.8	10.4	1.1	42.7	1.95	-12.1	+3.4
Tight fish	5,042	19.3	11.7	7.9	0.9	40.9	2.01	-10.2	+5.5
FISH	20,797	37.4	16.7	20.1	11.1	43.2	1.83	-30.7	-15.2

Reg-fishRemora

PFR < 15 · limp < 5 · gap 10–13 · −12.1 bb/100

The sucker-fish that swims with the sharks and never hunts. Learned where to be; never learned to attack.

They fall off the map for two arithmetic reasons and no conceptual one: their PFR sits just under the reg floor of 15, and their gap just over the reg ceiling of 10. Their densest cells cluster along PFR 14–16 — pressed against the reg boundary from underneath. A family this size, this coherent and this recognisable belongs as a type.

Aggression is a multiplier, not a virtue

Now that we have measured aggression properly, the old slogan turns out to be exactly right — and much sharper than we could say before.

Global AGG% is bets and raises divided by postflop opportunities, summed from raw counters across all three streets. Plotted inside each family, it does two opposite things:

Rake makes rooms incomparable — types are not

Every winrate here is post-rake, and rake is a property of the room, not of the player.

The median player loses −9.5 bb/100 on 888, −13.2 on iPoker, −15.2 on PokerStars and −16.0 on GG — and GG is 71% of the cohort, so it drags every pooled median toward its own. The type ORDER is unaffected: it reproduces in each room separately, which is why the ladder is safe to read and the absolute values are not. The last column of the reg-fish table is the fix where it matters — each player’s winrate minus his own room’s median, so the number describes the type and not the casino.

One number to remember

Of every 100 pots a player chooses to enter, how many does he end up winning? The pool answers 56. That number, Won-When-VPIP, is the runner-up in the reg contest above and the best of the outcome stats among fish — and what it reveals deserved its own article.

Different games draw different lines

All of this is the classic No-Ante 3–6max pool. Ante games play by other rules — literally: with antes in the pot, over-limping is correct, so the limp line dies and 3-bet% takes over. A type system that copies one format’s thresholds into another is measuring the rules, not the players — every threshold above is per-format and per-family, never shared.