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.netIt 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 $25)
I'm not on any comission by the way, I just like the program. HoldemManager gathers information on your hands, as well as the hands your opponents are playing. The feature I want to talk about first is the HUD.
A HUD displays some of the statistics that HoldemManager has gathered for us and transposes them directly onto the poker table where we are playing.
Using HUDs opens up a whole world of wierd and wonderful stats that we could possibly use while in play. We're not going to worry about them all just now because too much information is most definately a bad thing. We're just going to focus on two of them to begin with...
VPIP and Preflop RaiseThese two are your big ones, pretty much every strategy post on the 2+2 STT forums begin by describing these two numbers for a player
People might say the button was 45/12 or the small blind was 14/7 etc etc
What they're referring to is the VPIP/PFR stats that they have observed for that player.
VPIP (sometimes know as VP$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".