All that being said in my last post, I did get a chance to play some poker last night. I played full ring 25NL and was up about 1.5 buyins, which is great as far as I’m concerned. My PTBB/100 for 25NL is still at about 7.5, which makes me happy. I got paid off on a set of queens and a set of sixes. I would have been up another buyin, but a crazy loose player rivered 2 pair on me against my TPTK on a very non-threatening board. We got it in on the turn and I was way ahead.

In addition, I’ve been sneaking in some 2NL 6Max. I’d still like to work on my shorthanded game, so I’ve been playing it when I have a chance. It’s fun to play 2NL, because even if I get stacked, it’s not painful. I haven’t doublechecked my stats, but I’m up pretty good in my past 2 sessions – about 1.5 buyins. I still think I’d like to make the conversion, but the game is wilder and the swings are bigger, so we’ll see. I guess I’m just too conservative

Well, after some reflection, I figured out where the extra money came from. I’m definitely missing hands from .25/.50. If you read my previous post, I got half-stacked early on, and lost $25 I overplayed a medium pocket pair and folded on the turn after a large bet when it was apparent I was behind. I filled back up to $50, so it was like a $25 add on. Moments later, I got all in heads up on the flop with AK and a K on the flop vs. AK for a split pot and lost a couple bucks in rake. I then doubled up a couple times, once with a set, once with a pretty big steal. I won a few more insignificant hands. When I left the table after 150 hands or so, I had about $110. So, Pokertracker is missing about $35 dollars from my .25/.50 session. If I can find those hands and enter them, I will, if not, my .25/.50 stats will always be off about 70BB. Oh well. I wonder how many other hands I’m missing.

I haven’t updated my Pokertracker numbers online since June, so I thought I’d post them for you to peruse. I didn’t split them into games with 1000+ hands, it’s not worth the effort.

I’m most interested in the relationship between my PTBB/100, %VPIP, %Showdown%Won when saw the flop, and %Won when saw showdown. I’m looking for relationships, although I’m not seeing anything. I’m not really comparing NL and Limit, that’s pointless, so really, I’m focusing on NL, because I haven’t played any Limit in over a year.

Anyway, take a look and tell me what you think.

I seem to be getting more than my fair share of big pocket pairs. I don’t think it will continue. They did get cracked a couple times tonight, but overall I had a good showing. Getting paid off on my bigger hands.

Finally got Poker Grapher working. Below are my .10 NL results so far. If it wasn’t for that stiff run I had last week, I’d be in the $200 range.

Once again lost in two 45 man PS tourneys – getting short, no opportunities, then pushing and running into a ridiculous hand with top pair. I’ll live.

UB – $163.80
PS – $73.69

I saw this at Ed Miller’s message board, and thought I would pass it along:

http://www.notedpokerauthority.com/board?forum=1&topic=96#p619

This guy is talking about LHE, not NLHE, but the point is the same – using filters to identify specific hands for specific situations, then read through all the hands to see how you played them, and what you could have done differently. Definitely worth the time if you have it, and you have pokertracker.

I have a standing request from Justin at http://grindingforpennies.blogspot.com/ to grab some specific hand situations, and I haven’t had the time to do it. Maybe I will in the next few days. I spend most of my free time playing, because I don’t have a lot of it, but I need to go back and look at some hands and evaluate my play if I want to improve.

This is the second part in a series of posts where I’ll be discussing a recent posting of my Pokertracker stats.

Hopefully you looked at the spreadsheet I posted previously. I want to go into the detail about some of the numbers, and mention some ideas around them I’ve gleaned from online reading.
Everything kind of revolves around one column – PTBB/100. This is short for Pokertracker Big Bets per 100 hands. To really explain this, I’m going to have to go into a lot of detail. You will either find this boring or fascinating, and hopefully it’s the latter. If not, at least slightly educational.

For many years, poker theorists have discussed BB/HR (Big Bets per Hour) as the litmus test for your success as a poker player. Poker is a gambling game (don’t let people tell you otherwise), so there is going to be variance in your results, the ups and downs of luck. Sometimes you run hot, sometimes you run cold, but over a large hand sample you can and should show a positive result if you are doing things correctly. As a community, 1 BB/HR was the gold standard for a winning limit player. A solid player, over the course of many hours of play, should be striving for 1+ BB/HR. So, if you’re playing 1/2 Limit Hold’em, with .50/1.00 blinds, you should expect, over the long term, to make 2+ dollars an hour.

Unfortunately, that’s not all there is to the story, and there are different reasons for this. With the advent of online play, you can expect to play more hands per hour. Online games happen much faster than brick and mortar games. I average 55 hands per hour at an online table. At a typical casino, if things are really moving, you may play 30-35. In addition, many people play multiple tables. I generally play four, but I’ve been known to play 8 or 9 during unusual circumstances. So, instead of 30 hands per hour, you may play 220 or more hands per hour. This makes the 1+ BB/HR number irrelevant. Someone came up with the idea to measure in terms of BB/100 hands – a much more easily quantifiable number. 1+ BB/100 is still more or less the gold standard for limit play.

So, 1+ BB/HR is for limit play. In no limit, the large stacks relative to the blind size change this number as well. What makes it even more confusing, Pokertracker calculates NL a little crazy. It thinks that big bets and big blinds are the same. So, when you play .01/.02 NL, if you are averaging 1 BB/100, you are making .04 cents per 100 hands. What does this mean? It means that 1 BB/100 in limit is one half as much as 1 BB/100 in no limit.

Now, back to the spreadsheet, and my particular numbers. Over the course of x hands in .25/.50 limit, I’ve averaged 1.70 BB/100. In otherwords, $.85/100 hands. In .01/.02 NL, I’ve averaged 17.50 PTBB/100, or $.70/100 hands.

Most say anything more than 4 PTBB/100 is unsustainable over 10k+ hands at 25 NL and above, but I don’t think most people who think this much about poker have played 20k hands of .02 NL. Obviously, I’m overskilled for the limit, but due to my commitment to not reload, this is where I will continue to play at until I have the bankroll to move up.

Can you see where I’m going with this? While NL is generally the scarier game, because you stand to risk your entire stack at any time, it’s potentially much more profitable with less actual risk.

I’m generally risking ~$5.00 when I sit down at a .01/.02 NL table. I could get stacked 2 or 3 times, and potentially lose $15 or $20 in a night, which currently would represent 1/5 to 1/4 of my bank roll, but it’s highly unlikely at this level. The players are that bad. They will occasionally chase you down with the worst hand, but you can make them pay dearly to do it. At .25/.50 limit, I sit with $10.00, and if I get AA, and it’s capped each round because everyone is crazy,and more common than you’d think, I’m risking 1+1+2+2 for the 4 rounds of betting, for $6.00 a hand with no hope of at least getting the situation heads up to maximize the chance of winning the hand. After it’s been capped preflop and flop by 4+ people, the pot is going to be 8, so everyone is getting at least 16-1 on the turn. Your opponents are justified to chase gutshots and garbage 2 pair – 4 or 5 outs that give them 10.5-1 plus implied odds if you’re not in a position to raise and make them pay a little more to draw.

All in all, this post has a couple main points :

• Pokertracker can tell you a lot about whether you are playing profitably
• You should have > 5000 hands (although some say 10k, 15k, 20k before you should feel like yor PTBB/100 at a particular level has any merit
• In Limit, profitable is earning > 1 PTBB/HR at a particular limit
• In NL, profitable is earning > 1 PTBB/HR at a particular limit
• In NL, decent players should be making > 4 PTBB/HR at a particular limit
• Yay me, I’m making ~17.5 PTBB/HR at .02 NL

My next post will probably be about bankrolls, and I’ll make sure to show the relationship between these numbers, bankrolls, NL and Limit.

Pokertracker (www.pokertracker.com) rules. It takes all your hand histories for your games and parses them into numbers that get thrown into a database that you can then review, either through the Pokertracker interface, or, if you’re hardcore, MS Access. It allows you to review your own statistics, as well as numbers from your opponents. Why would you want to spend 55 bucks for some poker software? It allows you to find out a lot about the tendencies of you and your opponent.

I also use a free addon called Gametime+, which allows you to take the numbers of your opponents and overlay them on your online pokertables. It’s not exactly realtime, because you configure pokertracker to import hand history data in x minute intervals, but after 15 minutes at a table, you’ll have a few hands and you can start to get an idea of your opponents’ tendencies. I configure PT to collect at 3 minute intervals. It’s CPU intensive, so any more than that and it gets annoying.

I decided to do an export of some of the numbers I’ve collected over the past year or so that I’ve been playing online, in order to share them for discussion. They come out as a comma delimited file, so I’ve taken them and moved them to Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and published a sheet. Here’s the link – http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pGHLHpEyOyBLftKMAk7D_ag. If you don’t have a gmail account, now is the time to get one. There are so many neat tools – between email, Docs and Spreadsheets, blogger tools, and the integration with your personalized home page, I can’t see how anyone can live without one. I’m in the process of migrating all my online identities to Google.

What’s the story behind these numbers? They are my generic PokerTracker stats for various limit and no limit ring games. All the stats are from my games at PokerStars.

I figured it only made sense to post numbers for limits for where I have at least 5000 hands per game type. It makes the numbers somewhat statistically valid. I have samples for other limits where I have lost a lot of money, or won a lot of money, but I only have 10 or 100 hands. Consensus seems to be once you start getting to 10000 hands . I’ll add them to the sheet as I get over 5000 hands for that limit. While I’ve read that 10k, 15k, 20k, or 100k hands are required before you get an idea of where you’re at, I think 5k is a good place to start.

Anyway, take a look at the numbers. My next post will talk about some of the specifics and what they mean.