Beginners guide to Holdem Manager

[thetank]

EDIT - If you have a technical issue with holdem manager, this thread will probably not help you. You are best contacting holdem manager support or posting on their support forum.



This is a thread to teach players how to best go about using HoldemManager for Sit n Gos. I'll try to formally add something to it every Thursday, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the meantime.

You can download HoldemManager from their website. www.holdemmanager.net
It does cost $80, but they do a 15 days free trial.

If you play $22 tournaments or under, you can get a version of it that only costs $55 (it still has all the features, but you won't be able to upload any higher buy-in tournaments unless you upgrade for another $25)

I'm not on any comission by the way, I just like the program.


HoldemManager gathers information on your hands, as well as the hands your opponents are playing.  The feature I want to talk about first is the HUD.

A HUD displays some of the statistics that HoldemManager has gathered for us and transposes them directly onto the poker table where we are playing.
 
Using HUDs opens up a whole world of wierd and wonderful stats that we could possibly use while in play. We're not going to worry about them all just now because too much information is most definately a bad thing. We're just going to focus on two of them to begin with...

VPIP and Preflop Raise

These two are your big ones, pretty much every strategy post on the 2+2 STT forums begin by describing these two numbers for a player
People might say the button was 45/12 or the small blind was 14/7 etc etc

What they're referring to is the VPIP/PFR stats that they have observed for that player.

VPIP (sometimes know as  VP$IP) stands for Voluntarily put money in the pot.
Expressed as a percentage, this tells you how many hands a person has played.

PFR stands for Pre flop raise. It too is expressed as a percentage, and tells you how many hands the player had chosen to raise pre flop.

Note: PFR will never be larger than VPIP. Whenever someone raises pre-flop, it will not only increase their PFR%, but it also counts as them having VPIP-ed too.


These two numbers alone, the VPIP and PFR, give a strong indication as to what hands a player is playing pre flop.


Note : Stats don't make desicions for us, they can be misleading, inaccurate and it's dangerous to rely on them too much if we don’t know what we’re doing.
Don’t panic though, if used properly, they can give us clues that help build a bigger picture that we can apply to our desicion making process.





Instructions to configure our first basic HUD.

On the main holdem manager window go to the "HUD Options" tab and select the first option, "Player Preferences"

Select and remove almost everything from the right hand window under where it says "display these stats"
The only things we want to keep are Abb. Name, Hands, and then on a new line, VPIP and Preflop raise.


Abb. name means abbreviated name and this is just so you know which stats go with which player so we don't get mixed up at first.

Hands is simply the amount of hands that HoldemManager has observed for that player.
We need this to see how accurate the other two numbers are likely to be.

For example, a player who we have seen for only 10 hands and has a VPIP of 50%, may just be a tight player having a good run of cards.
On the other hand, a player we have observed for 250 hands and has a VPIP of 50%, we can be certain that they are very loose.

TOP TIP : The HUD boxes where the numbers appear on your FullTilt screen can be moved about to a place you think best by right click dragging.


Next time I’m going to talk about interpreting the VPIP and PFR numbers, and I’ll also talk a little about using the "additional HUD filters".

[celtic]

link spelt wrong imo.

[thetank]

cheers

[20Years]

nice so this means i will know how to actually use HEM!!! about time!

[Longy]

Tank are you going to go through which numbers you have displayed on your HUD, as I have been messing about with them this week and would be interested what you have on yours?

At the moment mine are

Line 1 VPIP/PFR/AGGfactor/No. of hands

Line 2 Steal from Sb%/ Fold bb to steal %/ Cbet flop %/ Went to showdown.

Tourney support is meant to be out today, it is like Christmas all over again.

[kinboshi]

Tanks Tank.  Should be a very useful thread for a lot of people.

[thetank]

Tourney support is meant to be out today, it is like Christmas all over again.

Let's hope it's worth the wait.



This is what my HUD looks like at the moment, but I'm not entirely happy and it's still very much a work in progress.



I'm tinkering with the pops and such too.

[jizzemm]

Tanks Tank.  Should be a very useful thread for a lot of people.

[Robert HM]

Tanks Tank.  Should be a very useful thread for a lot of people.

[Jim-D]

I downloaded the 15 day free trial but when i open the software it's telling me i have 0 of 15 days remaining and is telling me to register

Any idea what i do?

[Longy]

Send them an email ldo

[david3103]

Tanks Tank.  Should be a very useful thread for a lot of people.

+ another 1

I bought this and even at it's simplest level of seeing the VPIP for a player it's helping loads
Can't wait for the next instalment

[thetank]

Filtering the HUD

You may have heard it said that HUDs are a lot more useful in cash games than in tournaments. I can't argue with that because it's complety true.

Before we talk about using stats gathered by HUDs in tournaments, we need to understand why this is.

In the early levels of a tournament most players will be playing very few hands. In the later levels, especially near the bubble and heads up, the same players may be playing close to every hand. Blinds will change size in a tournament, and, as we get nearer the money, the value of chips will too meaning that people's stack sizes will dramatically affect the dynamic of the table.


To try and combat at least some of these problems, we filter hands for the number of players at the table. This helps us make the data a little more relevant.

A  problem now though, is we have even less of a sample size than before. Choosing how to set up our filter is a balancing act between including enough hands, and making sure the stats we get from those hands are not too irrelevant.


Setting up the HUD filters.

In HoldemManager, we click on the HUD options tab ,  then select additional HUD filters.

Some players set theirs up something like this...



The problem here is when you are playing someone for the first time, as players are eliminated we keep moving from having some information on them (eg, when we’ve been 7-9 handed for a few rounds) to having no information on them at all (as soon as we get to six handed).

Here’s how I set mine up at the moment...

EDIT : I no longer agree with this set-up. See this post...
http://blondepoker.com/forum/index.php?topic=39562.msg896310#msg896310



Note that as players are eliminated, the only point we will be left with no stats on a player is when we get to the heads up stage.

You could use either example, but I recommend having a wee think and changing things around to what you feel might work best for you.



More Problems.

Filtering hands in this manner does not solve all the issues, far from it.

If you think about your own bubble play for example. How many hands will you play if you have the comfortable chip lead, the blinds are high and the rest of the players are nitty. Compare this to how many hands you may play if there are medium sized blinds, you are in second place, and the other three players are quite loose.

Let’s say my HUD has been gathering stats in both these games and I'm playing another with you now. The figures  that I see for your VPIP and PFR may bear absolutely no relation to how you are going to play this bubble.

So we can see our poor stats are really up against it. We have to not only contend with small sample sizes made even smaller by filtering for what stage of the tournament we are at, but the few hands we do have may be misleading us anyway,  due to shifting dynamics of the tournament, and even the shifting moods of a player.



Don't do drugs, Stay in School

So with the above in mind, I’ll mention again that it would be wrong to use statistics gathered by HoldemManager or a similar HUD as a basis for making desicions in and of themselves. Rather, they should be seen as one more block that can aid you in the desicion making process.

If you want to get better and improve your feel and instinct for STTs, there is no substitute for good old fashioned observation.



You can still do some Drugs.

It’s not all doom and gloom, I will be back to post the second half of today’s post in the afternoon, to give a couple of ideas of how the stats can help us.
I’ll also walk you through one real life example of how I used someone’s VPIP and PFR in a hand that I played last night.

[Longy]

Fwiw my Hud is filtered

2-3
4-6
7-9

With no overlaps, as you have pointed out there are shortfalls in most filtering system, with sample sizes and changing dynamics. I try to make an effort in game to spot stand out tight or loose stats from early levels, so i can remember that for the mid and late game.

Good post so far Tank.

[thetank]

Using VPIP/PFR : Early stages.




Tight players

Even after only a hundred or so hands, you can usually identify the tight players with a reasonable degree of accuracy just using the VPIP/PFR stats.

So the guys who have stats of 10/8 and 13/10 after 100 hands are nearly always tight aggressive.
People who have stats like 15/9 and 16/8 are probably tight aggressive too, but are taking advantage of the low blinds to see flops with pocket pairs.

You could argue that a loose player could appear like they have tight stats because they are having a dry run of cards. While this may be true, in general a loose player is playing a lot of hands simply because he wants to play a lot of hands; this will not be affected too much by what he is dealt.


Loose players

The above is not as true for identifying loose players. A player whose true stats are 15/9 players could well look like a 32/19 player after a small sample if they are being dealt a lot of good cards.

The best way to identify the loose players for sure is to see what hands they are bringing to showdown.

Say you haven’t been able to do this though, if you have a sample size of more than 300 hands in the 7-9 handed stage then you can be reasonably confident that the 32/19 player is playing a loose aggressive style, and isn’t just getting a hot run of cards.

TOP TIP – If you are sharkscoping a player to find out if they are good or not but find they have an insufficient sample size for you to make such a judgement, you can combine whether they are up or down over a small sample with what their VPIP/PFR tells us to help get a better idea.




An example

We are 9 handed, all players have around about the starting stack, t1500
The blinds are 25/50 and you are in the cutoff seat with TT.
The action goes like this, UTG limps, UTG+1 raises to 225,  3 folds...
How to proceed?

What does the HUD tell us?

Our HUD is currently showing stats for 7-10 handed play.
The HUD shows that...
UTG has a VPIP/PFR of 29/4 after 250 hands.
UTG+1 has a VPIP/PFR of 11/8 after a sample size of 500 hands.


We can see straight away that UTG plays quite a few hands, and so we’re not going to worry too much about him. Our danger man is the UTG+1 player (ldo..coz he’s raised init?)

TOP TIP - You can hover your mouse button over a player’s VPIP or PFR stat to open a pop-up window that gives a breakdown of how often a player is calling or raising from each position. These pop ups can be customized too, there's a different screen depending on what stat you hover over.

The positional breakdown won’t be too useful, as it dilutes sample size even more, I wouldn't even look at it unless I had over 1k hands.
We can be safe to assume, however, that tight players have a degree of positional awareness, and will raise much less often in early position than their stat suggests.

In this example, because of the UTG+1 player’s position, we don’t think he’s going to be raising nearly as much as 8% of the time.
There is also the fact that he is not opening the pot, rather raising an already limped pot.

I’d use the available info the estimate that he has some rather good cards indeed. TT+, AQ+
In fact, there is a good chance the player doesn’t  raise AQo there.
(I don’t raise AQo in his position, and I probably limp TT and JJ.)

Without thinking too hard. I’m going to fold the TT here.


Nit

Do you agree?

Perhaps you think it’s super standard and would fold JJ here too. Or maybe you think we’re being far too nitty and should re-raise for value. I welcome all criticism as it's an oppurtunity for me to learn too.

This thread welcomes discussion on that, and of course, if anyone has any examples themselves of how you might use the VPIP/PFR stats in the early stages of a comp, they'd be cool to look at so please post away.


Cop out

I seem to be running a bit short on time as I’ve got something to do at 4.30, but will try and be back tomorrow to talk about the using these stats in the later stages of the comp.

It’s far more exciting, and my example is a real hand with pictures and everything!