I’ve spent the day mainly watching StoxPoker videos, and frustratingly didn’t have any eureka moments. Unfortunately it even appeared that I’ve been underestimating the strength of hands postflop – Ed Miller was happily bashing microstakes opponents with top pair medium kicker (and even middle pair), even shoving on the river with some of these hands. Obviously the difference comes in that he can easily recognise the dangerous boards, and has the hand reading skills to do this.
It got me wondering whether I was getting enough value out of my hands. Was I being too nitty? Am I really going to showdown too light? I seem to win small and lose big, but this could just be psychological – ie I remember the big losses more than the small ones.
So I dug into my PokerTracker and thought, how about some statistical analysis? I figured if I worked out the deviation of my wins/losses, it should show some skew somewhere that might help.
Here’s what I ended up with – it’s a frequency plot of win/losses in BB (big bets – 2xbb);
Uh, ok. What now? It was far more symmetrical than I was expecting. That’s a log scale on the y-axis by the way, otherwise the spike on the zero out-weighs everything.
I guess I don’t know what I would see if I was a winning player. Without anything to reference it to there’s not much it can tell me. I’m going to have to post something on 2p2 to see if there’s anyone else who’s thought about this…
Edit: I’ve just noticed on the win side there’s a little peak at the 50BB point, which corresponds to people who I stacked where they had full buy-in (100bb). Perhaps the drop between 25BB and 50BB is a sign of something – maybe I’m settling for a win of about 23BB too much. That’s too big to correspond to a CBet on the flop? Maybe it’s a shortstacker all-in?
Let me first start by saying that this is probably a stupid question. However, acknowledging that, I’ll ask it anyway. Where on pokerstars is the option to use real money? I’d like to deposit some cold hard cash and start playing some micro tournaments but, remarkably, cannot figure it out. Maybe I’ve had one too many beers today
… Can you help?
You’d think they’d make it easy for you – when I created a play money account for Titan, the online help chat thing opened and I was instantly asked if I needed help depositing money (by a live person). Pretty good if you’re new to it all, but it got a bit annoying as they were a fairly persistent…
You have a solid thought process when you are looking at your game play. I think the same way when I am looking at my game. I think that insight will continue to separate us from the field.
As far as not putting enough value into your hands… I find that common even at my level with the $20NL. The mind can play tricks on you though because guys are such calling stations then can hang around with hands they should have folded and you will often get sucked out. So I always bluff less but bet for value consistently. If they call and I get sucked out that’s fine sooner or later their bad play will be more profitable for me. Just thought I would share….
Brandon