Sample Chapter From the Poker Tracker Guide
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1.2.2 Leak Finding
After several players asked us to help them discover systematic errors in their play, we began seeing the same mistakes over and over. The following section describes these common mistakes and explains how to use Poker Tracker to discover if you’re making them in your own play.
1.2.2.1 Cold Calling Raises with Marginal Hands
One of the biggest mistakes in limit poker is cold calling raises before the flop with marginal hands. “Cold calling” refers to the action of calling two or more bets after one or more players have raised the pot before it is your turn to act. Since a raise indicates a strong hand for the raiser, there are very few hands for which calling is profitable. For example, cold calling with KQo against a reasonable raiser is a terrible play, since it’s very likely that our hand is dominated: the probability that the raiser has AK, AQ, AA, KK, or QQ is high. Even if we get lucky and the raiser has JJ, TT, 99, or 88, we are at best a 7% underdog. Even if we have reason to believe that the raiser will raise with hands like QJ or worse, we can’t be sure that he’s not holding AK when we flop a King.
In loose games, the implied odds often justify cold calling raises with non-powerhouse hands. In games where many players are taking a flop, pocket pairs, suited connectors, and suited aces can profitably cold call a raise. We’ll leave the math to you, but these types of hands will win more than their fair share in pots with many players in a “no fold-em” type game.
Thus, the only hands that we should be cold-calling raises with are small pocket pairs and suited one or two-gappers in games where we are relatively sure we will get high implied odds on our cold call. The only offsuit hand that we can profitably cold-call one or more raises with is AK, and we are often better off raising with big slick instead.
Poker Tracker allows us to easily determine if we are cold calling raises too often before the flop:
Above the “Known starting hands” pane, click the “filters” button
In the Vol. Put $ in Pot section, click “cold called” to view only the hands you called two bets cold before the flop
Click the column header “BB/Hand” twice to reverse sort by net win
1.2.2.2 Falling in love with a hand
Another common mistake in limit hold ‘em is holding on to pre-flop “monsters” such as AA and KK to the showdown, even when the board strongly suggests you are beaten.
The following steps allow you to determine if you’re falling in love with your aces and kings:
Above the “Known starting hands” pane, click the “filters” button
In the Showdown section, click “went to showdown and lost” to view only the hands you showed down and lost
Click the column header “BB/Hand” twice to reverse sort by net win
Click the column “Times” to sort by frequency
Remember that we are much more likely to take Aces and Kings to the showdown, because there are relatively few boards where it is likely that our hand is beaten (e.g. a four flush or a four straight). So it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to see AA and KK near the top of this “went to showdown and lost” list.
However, with big pairs like QQ and JJ, there are many times when an overcard flops, and we continue with the hand to the showdown despite strong evidence we are beaten. When we’re holding pocket jacks and facing a bet after a King comes on the flop, we’re forced to make a tough decision. If we find a lot of hands where we’re losing with JJ at the showdown, this is a sign that we’re hanging on to our pocket pairs for too long.
To perform this analysis, click on the specific hand of interest in the Known Starting Hand window (after we’ve sorted the hands using the steps described above). Are JJ and QQ near the top of the list? If so, it is likely you are “falling in love” with these big pocket pairs. On the other hand, it might just be bad luck—if your opponent rivers his set of twos every time you hold pocket Jacks, there isn’t much you can do to improve your play. Once you’ve selected JJ in the Known Starting Hands window, every hand that you were dealt JJ will show up in the bottom pane. Click on the “Net” column twice to sort by biggest net loss. In the rightmost column, a textual description of the winning hand appears.
The best way to gauge whether or not you are falling in love with your JJ is to check if most of the winning hands contain either a pair of aces or a pair of kings. Unfortunately, there is no way to see the board cards without replaying the individual hand (click on the green “r” button above the pane or the “game #” link to playback the hand). Note that we are not recommending the weak-tight approach of folding pocket jacks or queens every time an ace or king hits the board. The goal of this type of review is to discover a pattern of going too far with big pocket pairs when it is extremely unlikely our hand is best. For example, on a flop of Ac Kd 7s, if we hold JJ and we are facing a bet and a raise on the flop, our hand looks just as good as pocket deuces. Playing back these hands helps us to correct mistakes like these, and stop us from falling in love with our big pairs.
1.2.2.3 Position statistics
There is a great deal written about “the importance of position” in the Texas Hold ‘Em literature, yet many players continue to underestimate the value of knowing the actions of their opponents before they are forced to make a decision. Since Hold ‘Em is a game of incomplete information, the more information we can gather before it’s our turn to act, the better our chances of winning. Obviously, the player who is first to act (“under the gun”) has far less information than the player last to act (“on the button”), but it’s difficult to quantify how much this extra information is worth in terms of big bets. Fortunately, Poker Tracker breaks down our play by position, allowing us to see exactly how much we are winning or losing at each position relative to the button.
To analyze your positional play, click on the tab marked “Position Stats” at the top of the screen. In the top pane, your performance at each position relative to the button is displayed, with a row for each seat at the table. The left most column displays the # of players between you and the button (e.g. if you are the second to last player to act, you are “one off the button,” denoted “1” in the leftmost column). We suggest that you set the filter to the upper right of the pane to fit the game you wish to analyze. For full ring games, we set the filter to “hands between 7 and 10 players”, and for shorthanded games, we choose “between 4 and 6 players”. We use these numbers because they represent breakpoints in positional play—one off the button in a three handed game is extremely different than one off the button in a 10 handed game—and we don’t want to compare data from games that are fundamentally different.
After we’ve set our filter, we can begin to analyze our performance by position. If our database contains a reasonable number of hands (e.g. 10,000), the data should show a definite correlation between the percentage of times we voluntarily put money in the pot (VP$IP) and our position. One of the most important statistics gathered by Poker Tracker is VP$IP, which stands for Voluntary Put Money in the Pot. VP$IP represents the percentage of times that a player chooses to either call a bet or raise before the flop.
As we go down the list (and get further away from the button), our VP$IP should decrease slightly at each position, confirming the fact that we are playing slightly more hands as our position improves. Likewise, both Win % and BB Won/Hand should increase slightly as we get closer to the button. If your BB Won/Hand is not higher from late position (on the button, one off the button, or two off the button), then it’s likely that you need to re-evaluate your starting hand selection from each position. We recommend playing only premium hands from early position (six or seven off the button), which means your VP$IP for these positions should be less than 20%. For more information on starting hand requirements based on position, see Abdul Jalib’s preflop strategy recommendations at the following link:http://tinyurl.com/4nsp7.
1.2.2.4 Playing from the Blinds
Since we are forced to put money into the pot from the blinds, our analysis of hands played from the blinds is completely different from all other positions. It’s often said that blind play “separates the men from the boys,” and that the difference between mediocre players and good players is in how well they play the blinds. In the long run, everyone loses money in the blinds. But good players lose less money than average players by understanding that play from the blinds requires different strategy due to the forced bet.
The last two rows in the Position Stats table show results for all Big Blind hands (BB) and Small Blind hands (SB). Note that in the BB, the VP$IP figure represents all instances when we called a raise or raised the pot ourselves. Note that even if the pot is raised and no other player calls, we are still getting approximately 3.5 to 1 odds (there are two small bets contributed by the raiser, either ½ or 1/3 of a small bet contributed by the small blind, and one small bet contributed by our forced bet) on a call from the big blind. Even the mighty Ace-King offsuit is less than a 2 to 1 favorite when heads-up against a hand like 98 offsuit (assuming both hands go to the showdown), so if we throw these marginal hands away in the blinds, we are giving up a lot of positive expectation. However, it’s important to remember that we are first to act for the remainder of the hand, and our poor position decreases the value of our hand. We don’t recommend defending the blinds with any two cards, but we do suggest defending the big blind with any “reasonable” hand (we refer you to the section titled “Defending The Blind” in http://tinyurl.com/4nsp7 for a further discussion of which hands are reasonable).
Play in the small blind is different, since the pot is laying us weaker odds to call a raise than when we are in the big blind. Obviously, in games where the small blind represents 2/3 of a small bet, we have much better odds to call a raise or limp in along with the rest of the field. When the SB is 1/3 of a small bet, our odds are drastically reduced, and we recommend playing these hands as if you were in late position (but keeping in mind that you will be first to act for the rest of the hand).
As we said earlier, your Poker Tracker statistics will show that you are losing money from the blinds. We believe a reasonable loss rate in the big blind is somewhere below two times your win rate at your most profitable position. For example, if you are winning .13 BB per hand on the button, and losing .18 BB per hand on the big blind, you are playing your big blind extremely well. How did we come up with this number? Suppose you fold your big blind 100% of the time the pot is raised. Also suppose you face a raise 60% of the time (10 relatively passive players who raise 6% of the time). Thus, you will lose 60 big bets out of every 100 hands (one big bet for each time you fold to a raise). Assuming you win your fair share of the other 40 hands (approximately one out of 10 hands for a full table), and estimating an average pot size of seven big bets (we obtained this estimate from http://www.pokerpulse.com/action/ap50150.htm) you will win four hands for a total of 28 big bets. This results in a total loss of 32 big bets per 100 hands, for a loss of .32 big bets per hand. This “fold to any raise” strategy is obviously not a good one, but we provide this example to show give you a worst-case scenario for loss rate from the big blind.
If your loss rate is around .26 BB/100 (double your win rate of .13 BB on the button), you need to analyze and improve your big blind play. Since the small blind ranges from 1/3 to 2/3 the size of the big blind, your loss rate will depend on the game you are playing. Even if the SB is 2/3 of the BB, your loss rate would be .33 BB (2/3 * ½ * BB = 1/3 BB = .33 BB) if you folded every hand you were dealt in the SB. A detailed discussion of playing the small blind is beyond the scope of this book, but we again refer the reader to Abdul Jalib’s discussion of pre-flop play here: http://tinyurl.com/4nsp7 (see the section titled “Defending The Small Blind”).
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