6-Seaters v 10-Seaters

I have had a gut feeling for a while that I am winning more money at 6-seater tables than at 10-seater tables. As a reminder of the payout structure :
At 6-seaters, only the top 2 pay (a 60/40 split of the winnings)
At 10-Seaters. The top 3 pay (a 50/30/20 split of the winnings)

My pub mathematics tell me that in the long run, if all players had equal ability, then I would expect over the long run to win money 30% of the time in the 10 Seater room, compared to 33% in the 6 Seaters. i.e not an awful lot in it in terms of the frequency of winning some money, and no really blatantly obvious reason why I should perform much better in the 6 seaters than the 10 seaters.

This isnt borne out by my (somewhat sketchy) statistics that I have kept of my play of the past 2 months. There are a couple of trends that kinda jump out of my stats which cover about 200 games over the past 2 months.

Firstly, I am a break even player in 6 seater games. My losses are mostly accounted for by my 10-Seater games. Within the 10 seater games, I lose more heavily in speed games than I do in the standard games. Note that I am not completely rubbish at the 10 seaters, I win a reasonable amount of them... but clearly short of my "fair share" that would let me break even.

Secondly, within the 10-seaters, I lose more at Speed Poker than I do at standard speed. At standard, I have a steady downward trend. In Speed poker, the losses are far more pronounced.
Thirdly, within the 6-seaters, I make the money positions more often when the buy-in is higher (typically $22) than at the lower $11 / $6 buy ins. Fascinating stuff. To me anyway. If you have similar trends in your play, I would love to hear them.

Time to theorise why. My basic assumption at the moment is that I am not particularly skilled at playing games where there at a lot of gamblers/coin flippers. You know the sort. Pre-flop, they will bet big with any pocket pair, most aces (however raggy), and any two reasonable suited cards. Then whether the flop hits them or not, they will often bet big. All-ins are a staple bet. I suppose they are the fishiest of the fish in the fish kingdom - and to me, damned hard to play against in numbers.

My limited experience tells me that the coin flippers are far more likely to play 10-seaters, and even more so to speed games. I would say that its more normal for there to be only 1-2 of these sorts of players on a 6 seater table, and I seem able to adjust my play and suckout chips from them - whereas on the 10 seater games I am more likely to hand over my chips to them as I get sucked into their "gunfight at the OK Corral" showdowns.

The more volatile the game, with lots of players making bad decisions, then I do worse. Show me a $3 speed game with 10 players and I would generally lose money in the long run.. but in a $22 6-seater game at standard speed, I can hold my own quite consistently over a prolonged period.

Interesting stuff. I'm off to think about what strengths & weaknesses this indicates in my play. This could take a couple of days.