blonde poker forum

This has been asked for in another thread and I appear to have volunteered myself for it. This is by no means a complete guide and is more my thoughts on the subject. All my views are based on the game I play 6 max NLHE.

I use the statistics from poker tracker a great deal to make reads on people and get an idea of how my opponents play. I would emphasise this is guide and stats can't tell you everything, along with the numbers i take notes on how players play hands which the numbers can't tell you.

I have 10 stats displayed in game when I'm playing using PAHUD (which overlays the stats on the table from poker tracker), I will go through the main 4 and if people find stuff useful I will write stuff about the other stats to be found in poker tracker.

VPIP- Is the stat that tells you how often a player enters a pot voluntarily (checking your bb doesn't count). This is the first and most useful number when facing an unknown, it tells you if they are tight or loose and therefore we can estimate the range of hand they are playing preflop. It is also a reasonable guide to how "good" someone is and there is a correlation between winrate and vpip more than any other stat.

0-15% Anyone in this range is tight and plays few hands, they are in the main not great players to have at your table. They are however exploitable, they are easy to read as you can put them on a hand easier and therefore you can make easier reads postflop given flop texture, plus you can bully them as they will rarely play back at you.

15-30% This can be a right mixture of players from a good TAG/LAG players to weak passive players. In my opinion this is the optimal range and most of the good winning players are somewhere in there. There is no perfect number, good TAGS and LAGS can be either end of this range and be solid winners. The advantages of playing this style is that while you aren't playing junk, you are playing enough hands to make your preflop range hard to read, all pairs, big cards, suited connectors etc are all in your preflop range. These are players I most like to avoid.

30%+ There are very few players (less than 1%) that can play profitably with this VPIP. These are the players you want at your table, find them and sit with them. If you can get position on them even better, don't be afraid to get in pots with them. They are the weak players and generally play poorly postflop ,often because of their loose starting hand range. I like to isolate these players in pots meaning i will raise preflop with a wide range of hands to get the flop heads up and play from there.


PFraise%- Is how often someone raises before the flop, this gives you guide to how aggressive they are. I would look at this stat and how close it is ratio wise to vpip. It is a contentious issue but to play a close to unexploitable preflop strategy in 6 max, your pfr% should be close to your vpip, i never open limp in 6 max for example. The brief reasoning for this is that it makes you hard to read as opponents can't decipher between the hands you limp and the hands you raise, also you will take the blinds more which is never a bad thing.

This reasoning should be applied to your opponents as well, if the pfr% is more than 1/2 (I would recommend that at least 3/4 is optimal) we can reason they are aggressive and in turn are generally a reasonable player. If it is less than 1/2, these players tend to be passive and when they do raise you can put them on a strong hand in relation to their range.

Aggression Factor- Aggression factor is worked out by dividing amount of raises or bets by amount of calls. This is your best guide to how aggressive/passive someone is postflop.

0-1 These players are passive they rarely bet without the goods and unless you have a strong hand when they do, get out of the way. However they do like to call, so when playing a hand even if it is something like top pair medium kicker, value betting is key. Don't be afraid to make bets against these players, they will call you with some amazingly weak hands.

1-2.5 This is the middling range and you can assume that they play relatively straightforward, bet their made hands, strong draws and only call with marginal type hands.

2.5+ Is aggressive and these players tend to bet made hands and non made hands. Rarely call, if they are calling there is normally a reason they are doing this.

These are based on total aggression factor which is across the streets (Flop/Turn/River), there are stats in PT that breakdown the stats by each individual street. Generally good players will have an aggression factor where flop>turn> river and weaker players will almost go the other way.

Total Number of Hands

Sample size is crucial when assessing stats, I would say 100 hands is the minimum you want to be drawing any real conclusions from anything. The first two stats and vpip start to converge at this point to give you a good general guide but they probably won't become stable until you reach 1000+ hands.

Aggression factor i would say don't pay great attention until you get to 500 hands as a guide, you can get situations where a run of cards means a player is calling more than often or raising more than often.


Ok and breathe i was going to write more but I think this is enough. I will follow this up with the more obscure of the stats if people find it useful. Any comments are welcome on what I'm covering, whether you disagree with me or just to say that i have the writing skills of a 6 year old ,English has never been an academic strength.

Fantastic stuff Longy.  Makes sense to me and is very helpful.  When I've read it again and had chance to digest it and think it through, I'll be back with some questions.

:)up

Cheers, will be back with some questions later.

One leak that had crept into my game now successfully plugged.  Wasn't even aware I was doing it.  Noticed that my VPIP was a lot higher than the PFR - and I'm already feeling more confident that I'm playing better.

One beer owed  :)up.

Thanks for that, i've never known exactly what they all mean.

One other thing, when someone says a player is 20/2/2 or any combination of three numbers what stats is this referring to?

Also what do the auto rate descriptions actually mean in profitability terms at the table? Which players should be avoided and which should be farmed?

Thanks

If someone is 20/2/2 it means they have:20% vpip/2% PFraise/2 Total agression factor. I think this notation came about as this is how GT+ (game time+ a forerunner of pokerace hud) displayed the stats on the screen.

The auto rate description I have never been a fan of and have never found any that have been particularly useful to me, though of course you can tailor your own in Poker Tracker.

In terms of whether a player is profitable VPIP is easily the biggest factor. When playing around poker tracker filter one day that players with less 30 vpip in my 6 max database were beating the rake on average. Whereas players above this were losing around 15 big blinds every 100 hands. Of course this is not anywhere near the answer to being profitable but its the best guide among the stats imo.

Quick question,

How usefull is poker tracker playing mostly STT/MMT tournaments rather than cash ?

Dougie.

No doubt its less useful than it is for cash. I still found it useful when playing stt's basically everyone who is semi-comptent in sngs play really nittish early and this leads to them having certain stats, so you can pick out the maniacs from the good players straight away.

If i was purely an online tourney player I could take it or leave it, as for cash I think its an essential tool.

Very useful on Stars (but not iPoker) for revealing the mucked cards at showdown on the table (using PA HUD with PT), and saving the hassle of having to view the instant hand history.

However, this is probably not a good enough reason to invest in both pieces of software!

How do you do that?

Edit: Got it sorted!

BTW, Anyone who uses PT2. I would strongly suggest downloading beta of holdem manager. It is far better then PT2 in every way.
PT3 beta should be out in next few weeks as well so keep an eye out on that as well

great post longy, look forward to the rest.

What would  you say is a good win rate per bb/100 on Poker tracker for 6 max NL.
Mine is in the green but not by a lot and i only have a small sample size of hands at the moment (10k)
Would 100k hands give accurate readings for this stat?

Cheers

edit - ive just realised mine is set to Big Bets (limit) not big blind, so in theory im running twice as good as i thought :) ...i think???....am i????

100k hand is probably the benchmark for sample size. A good winrate all depends on limits your playing etc. A simplistic guide I would say anything in the green is "good" (remember only about 10% of online players are winners long term), over 2PTBB/100 is pretty solid and anything over 5PTBB/100 is crushing the game.

These are all in PTBB/100 which is actually 2BB/100 as poker tracker takes its reasoning from limit poker where its all worked out in big bets.

Cheers Longy,
I thought that was what it meant, well im over 5ptbb/100 at the moment (25/50cNL) for 10k hands.
Doesnt seem much but at least my roll is still going up!
Ive done that 10k in a week so a few months to go untill i know where i am and then hopefully move up a level.

thanks again.

Just bought PokerTracker and PAhud but i'm having trouble with the hud, I'm running 4 cash tables on blonde but the hud is only showing 1, Any ideas?

Hmmm sorry Jim with my experience of pahud it could be anyone of a number of things. After fiddling around with the thing alot and if still doesn't work, i ask on their forum which is http://pokeracesoftware.com/forums/.

Oh it's ok Longy, school boy error on my part,  I'm still in the 30 day trial mode and it will only work with 1 table  DOH!

Is it possible to see how much rake you've paid in a month? if so how do i go about this please?

If you talking about from rakeback MGR point of view there are fancy ways of doing it which i have never tried, but i just use pokergrapher (http://www.overcards.com/wiki/moin.cgi/PokerGrapher)  which has rake calculator built into it, as well as you can make pretty graphs with it.

If you taking plain rake of course just set the date ranges in "preferences" and its on the general info tab.

cmon longy, post ur stats. :)

Lol its not a big secret and if anyone is desperate to know i suppose you can pm me. As i play under very obv screen names, I won't post them on here.

Thank you for that mate, just what i needed

Poker tracker is the bollocks!

Wait till you get to 800k hands and forget to compact it for a month, thereby making it impossible to compact ever again, even when left on overnight. The time it takes to load makes me hate it now. New DB on PT3 baby!

Have you converted the db to sql, my database is pretty damn big but it runs quickly now i have converted from access.

Longy, are there any other add-ons to PT that you'd recommend?

There are none that I use that come to mind, though there are various things out there that I don't use mainly because they won't work on laddies.

Like spade eye which allows you to datamine on sites like party which can't do by simply observing and running pt, also it assists with table selection. Also there are various types of hud out there apart from poker ace many displaying 3bet %.

To be honest I browse the 2p2 software forum on a regular basis and thats where i pick up nice bits of software, that help make playing poker online an easier process.

Do you recommend converting PT from Access to SQL?  Is it easy enough to do?  I see there's an option to do it, but I've never been brave enough to go for it :D

Nice post btw :)

There is no need to, until you feel PT is taking excessively long to do things. I kept my database as access for a long time but they started to become so big that PT was being an awkward bugger. So i converted them and voila things were alot smoother.

I have 250k+ hands(conservative estimate) in my current db.

Longy post your hud layout for Microgaming - I need a decent layout for Ladbrokes/Battlefield Poker.

Cheers

Top 3 numbers are cbet/fold to cbet/went to showdown

Then VPIP/PFR/total agg factor/no of hands

Bottom white numbers agg factors by street.

I don't have this particular add-on yet, but I know friends of mine that do. There's one that shows you how often you're flopping sets against how often you should. And I also think there's some sort of Sklansky bucks grapher which shows how you're running in all-in situations afaik.

Longy, either of these ring a bell?

Aaah yes the poker EV  it sounds like. Doesn't work with laddies so i don't use it myself.

http://www.pokerevsoftware.com/

I was looking at that today  :)  Looks nifty, although I haven't looked far into it, just noticed it on 2+2. 

Is this something you can change in PT?  How do you do it?

Preferences tab, right hand side under the list of game levels - there's a tick box labelled "treat 'BB' for NL/PL as big blind amount". Tick it. Or don't. As you wish.

Obviously most people use ptbb/100 as their unit of choice, and therefore leave it unticked.

If you're in the red you should definitely leave it unticked so as to make your losses appear smaller. If you're winning but at a very modest rate you should probably tick it, in order to massage your ego by making your results look better than they are.

Cheers Mosk,

So if I were to say that I was running at 6BB/100, people would generally assume it was the unticked figure?  I guess I'd best leave it alone for general ease of understanding.

Question re Aggression Factor.

You mentioned that 2.5+ is pretty aggressive, but at the moment, I seem to be running at an average of 4.  On 3 of my tables, it's been up at 11 which amazed me, especially considering my VPIP and PFR isn't that high (around 13 and 10) - is this normal?  I didn't think I was playing that aggressive tbh. 

On the plus side, where you mention that Flop>Turn>River, I am in that direction so it's not all bad I suppose.

Obviously it's game dependent, but I was wondering if perhaps there are situations where I should be slowing down a touch.

Firsty as I think I mentioned in my OP, sample size is crucial and the agg factors don't settle down until you have played at least 500 hands.

Nothing wrong with being aggressive in poker, its alot better than passive. My total agression factor is over 3 over a very large sample. Playing 13/10 you are even more likely to be aggressive due to the factor that you are playing premium hands which tend to make some form of hand postflop and when you do play a hand you normally are the agressor preflop, so are naturally the agressor postflop.

It's over 1600 hands.  I am playing quite tight though so it hopefully will be that.  I was just looking at others with similar stats and their AF was pretty low in some instances. 

Some good information there. I for one appreciate your efforts.

A few questions though...

(1) On my 'preflop 3bet percentage' it may say 3/7. Okay, so I've 3bet preflop 3 times, but what is the 7? What is it out of?

(2) Have you recently spotted any good stats that may be worth displaying? What is your current line up?

(3) How do you find out your own stats in terms of vp, pf, af, cbs, etc? Are they all in one place on PT?

(1) This may be wrong as there was no 3bet stat in PT2 and I have not upgraded. I think the 3 represents 4bet (and 5bet, 6bets etc) and the 7 is your 3bet%.

(2) My pahud line is about 8 posts up this page.

(3) VPIP, PFR and af are all in the general info tab on PT2 and cbet was hidden away in the more stats button.


This maybe better answered/corrected by someone with PT3.

Thx

It's 3 preflop 3bets out of 7, followed by the percentage. I'm just not sure what it's out of. ie. Is the 7 the amount of times he's had the chance to three bet me?

That would be my best guess, snoops.

You can get this on iPoker now with PT3.