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My PokerTracker All In Performance Can’t be Working

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

So far this month my NL5 game has done ok – up $67;

24Sep09_NL5

Except I haven’t made $67 since my attempts at NL10 went wrong and I’m actually only $0.40 up :-( I guess it’s still +ve.

However it’s gets a bit shocking when you look at my all-in performance for NL5;

24Sep09_NL5-allinperformance

Clearly my PokerTracker is just plain broken. No other reason for it.

Other news – tomorrow I complete the Full Tilt Take 2 promotion, so that’s a free $50, plus rakeback is currently $25. Fantastic – if only I’d had Rakeback a year ago, it would made so much difference…

Is This Normal?

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

Sunday morning didn’t go as well as Saturday. In fact it all went tits up again – I’d got to the point where I’d doubled my $50 deposit on Full Tilt, and then suddenly it all turned around. It started with a complete moron move which was so bad I’m going to name and shame myself;

I’d been running ok for about an hour, and was $30 up (and unfortunately most of it was on this table). Overconfidence clearly made me turn a reasonable hand into a stupid bluff;

$0.05/$0.1 No Limit Holdem
6 players

Stacks:
UTG ($4.07)
UTG+1 ($3.49)
CO ($11.86)
BTN ($15.31)
SB ($10.85)
Hero (BB) ($28.38)

Pre-flop: ($0.15, 6 players) Hero is BB J Q
3 folds, BTN raises to $0.35, 1 fold, Hero raises to $0.90, BTN calls $0.55

Flop: 7 J 7 ($1.85, 2 players)
Hero bets $1, BTN raises to $3, Hero goes all-in $27.48, BTN goes all-in $11.41

Turn: T ($43.74, 2 players)

River: Q ($43.74, 2 players)

Final Pot: $30.67
BTN shows: 9 7
Hero shows: J Q

BTN wins $28.67 ( won +$13.36 )
Hero wins $13.07 ( lost -$15.31 )

Admittedly unlucky that I came up against a 7, but what was I expecting the villain to call that shove with?

Anyway, it then got worse when I hit an Ace high flush which I regrettably slow played slightly – the board paired on the river and the villain took my stack with his full house. I then continued to run head first into straights and flushes losing pot after pot. Finally Full Tilt told me I no longer had funds to reload at one of my tables – I’d dropped below $40 :-(

I played a bit more then gave up feeling very miserable. All the way up to a $100+ weekend, then to fall all the way down again.

However, I just checked with PokerTracker, and it wasn’t as bad as it felt;

09Aug09

So, $50 up :-) Plus quite a few points closer to clearing those bonuses, so not all bad. Just not all that great either, relatively speaking…

Sudden Burst of Good Stuff on 2Plus2

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

I was wondering if there was a good way of figuring out how many hands it took before you could rely on a villains stat, and so asked it on 2p2. I didn’t expect too much of a response really, and most of the replies were what I expected (ie lame), but a couple pointed out some other posts that were really good.

The first thing I found out was that the micro full ring section of the forum had been having ‘concept of the week’ posts, which look pretty good. Since I play 6max I’ve never really bothered looking there. The other week there had been one on getting the most out of PT/HEM, and this had some excellent posts by mpethybridge.

This then lead to a really nice archived post which mathematically showed how only 40 hands was needed to feel confident on VP$IP (or at one point, he shows how just 6 hands can be enough!). Both this one and mpethybridge’s posts also gave some good insights into 3bet% stats too (apparently mpethybridge has a ‘well’ post somewhere, so I’ll try and hunt that down).

So that was all pretty good – there’s some great stuff on that forum, but most of it’s really buried. The list of links they have in the stickies doesn’t do it justice really…

Update: Going through the Concept of the Week posts (index here) I came onto this gem. In particular the Sun Tzu quotes were really cool. I’d like to use one as a slogan on this blog, but that would be too corny…

Surprising Fault with PokerTracker

Sunday, May 31st, 2009

I can’t start PokerTracker, and looking at 2p2 forums it looks like no-one else can either. Their servers are all down, and apparently PT verifies its license on startup.

That was a bit of a shock. I’m not worried about playing without the benefit of the HUD, but it’s not so great that I’ve a product that will only be useful while PokerTracker.com is in business.

V annoying, especially as normally I’ve only good things to say about PT3 (so many people prefer HEM, but I suspect they’ve not tried PT3 – comparisons with PT2 definitely preferred HEM, but I think the latest PT definitely covers all the previous deficiencies plus much more).

Update: Did most of my work, so played a bit of poker. Almost wish I hadn’t (or at very least, should have stopped while ahead);

31may09

There were one or two bad beats in that fall (my set beat by a pair of queens that made a straight on the river!), but I can’t blame variance really – there were enough hands that I played badly to blame myself for the loss. One that stands out the most was AJo in the big blind – I 3bet the button’s raise, he reraised then I shoved – not sure that was a good move really (maybe it’s ok with suited? Perhaps not even then?).

Keeping A Lid On The Tilt

Monday, May 25th, 2009

Very frustrating session. The ‘Unexpected Value’ series of Stox videos has been talking about how most people (beginners) think the way to win at poker is with big hands, hitting flushes & coolering your opponent etc. while the real way is to consider your opponents hand more than your own (2nd level thinking I guess).

I know what that means, but I still find it difficult to suppress that frustration when nothing ever hits the flop. I think it’s mainly down to impatience – taking pots with cbets, check raises etc is obviously great, but it’s very annoying when after doing that for a bunch of hands, winning say, 50-80BB, and then losing it plus a whole load more because a ‘big hand’ goes wrong :-(

So my session today was swingy, and overall not very good. The only thing that saved it was the last half hour or so when the poker gods completely turned around and gave me hand after hand. No subtleties needed, just get the money in good!

25may09

I ended up on three tables holding a stack of about 200-300bb on each. On one table two donors had already stormed off after being stacked a bit too much. So at least it was fun towards the end.

More HUD stuff – I know S1ndr0me was having trouble with keeping his screen clean with multiple tables and a hud, so I thought I’d show a screen shot with the new advanced hud I’ve got. Only four tables, but that’s all I ever play, plus I couldn’t get more than that on my laptop screen (so any more and they’re going to have to be stacked). Anyway, looks pretty tidy to me (the Pokerstars skin is a homemade one, but wasn’t that hard to do);

tables

Update: Played a bit more, and pushed the win up to $24. Happy with that – it’s making the last bad session not so horrible :-)

Recuperation Day

Sunday, May 24th, 2009

Yesterday a friend got married, so we spent the day making small talk to old people and drinking to excess. Today I feel a bit ill.

So I’m staying off the tables as I can’t concentrate very hard. Haven’t neglected poker entirely though – I watched a couple of Stox vids by mbolt1, and they were both pretty good. I don’t think I learnt anything new though, but it did reaffirm that I’m not too far off the mark. At one point he talked about how he was doing just before getting coaching from Leatherass, and he was struggling at 25NL not because he didn’t know how to play, but because of tilt – just like me! (except I’m 10NL. details, details…).

Anyway, he had a fairly customised HUD and had a couple of things that looked interesting, so I decided to see what could be done about mine. I then realised he was using a tweaked version of kraada’s Advanced hud layout which is downloadable from the PokerTracker website. So I installed it;

advancedhud

At first glance it looks kinda crazy, but it’s not that bad. A lot of the useful information is in the pop-ups (the big black box), and rather than one strip of info (with one big popup), it’s now divided into three smaller sets, each with its own relevant pop-up. Information overload perhaps, but I think it’s worth a try to see how ergonomic it is.

The biggest improvement is something I’ve wanted for a while, and that’s betting stats (like call/bet/3bet %) in relation to position. I’ve shown it in the pop-up in that pic. Notice that the player in question (Glazyrin) has a good tag VP$IP/PFR (19/16 – it’s the first two numbers on the strip above his cards), but when you see it split by position, it seems that he’s completely unaware of position (although sample size isn’t quite enough to be really sure of that). At first I thought I was misunderstanding it since I rummaged through player after player trying to find someone who was very tight in EP, a bit looser MP and loose in LP, and I just couldn’t find anyone! I then checked my stats, and I was fine – in that particular session after 60 hands my VP$IP for ep/mp/lp was 8%/30%/49% (from a slightly loose VP$IP of 30% overall)

That was quite an eye opener. You assume anyone with ‘proper’ V$PIP/PFR knows what they’re doing, but when you see that their opening range is pretty much the same at any position it casts a whole new light on things!

New PokerTracker

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

I’ve just downloaded the new PokerTracker beta – All-in performance charts have been added at last! Looks like I went through a lucky patch early on in my ‘career’, but it evened up recently. The recent unluckiness coincides with my tighter range I implemented in December, so I guess in reality that change in strategy was better than it appeared. Maybe I shouldn’t feel so bad that my cash games haven’t been as meteoric as I’d hoped…

I downloaded the beta mainly to add M to my hud (how lazy! It’s not like it’s a hard stat to work out on the fly), and while it’s not in PT by default, they describe how to add it here, but it required the latest beta.

The only other new things that are immediately obvious is a details page, giving an overall rundown all on one page, and having the HUD on the hand replayer. Not sure that the details page is that useful, but the replayer hud definitely is (although at the moment it’s hanging my computer, but then it is a beta…).

Update: Today was an MTT day – while trying to mess around with PokerTracker and failing to add M to the HUD (can’t be done apparently, despite that link) I was doing $0.25 tourneys while testing what would show (or not show) on the HUD. Once I found I couldn’t do it, I realised I was in the middle of two 45 player tournaments, and doing ok. I went on to place 1st in one of them, but bust out the other – massive prize of $3.49, but when the outlay was 25 cents that’s a nice bit of ROI :-)

I then figured I might as well stick to the MTTs since it was raining, and randomly opened $1 tournaments (18, 21 and 45s). By the end of the day I’d played 13 tournaments (not incl the 25 cent ones), and only got winning places in the 18s (one 1st and two 2nds). Not a massive number of wins, but still an overall profit of $5.14 – compared to cash games not fantastic for 5 hours of on and off pokering, but still +ve, and fun, so whatever.

I’m mainly pissed off at the very last tournament – I was chip leader all the way up to the HU stage, and even to the point that I had half the total chips on the bubble, and then on HU I was the chip leader by 20k to his 7k. Somehow I still managed to hand them all over giving him the win.

  • Penultimate hand;
    No Limit Holdem Tournament
    $1.00+$0.20
    2 players

    Stacks:
    BTN (7461)
    Hero (BB) (19539)

    Blinds: 200/400 Ante 25

    Pre-flop: (650, 2 players) Hero is BB T Q
    BTN raises to 1,200, Hero goes all-in 19,514, BTN goes all-in 6,236

    Flop: 6 T 7 (27,000, 2 players)

    Turn: J (27,000, 2 players)

    River: 5 (27,000, 2 players)

    Final Pot: 14,922
    Hero shows: T Q
    BTN shows: J T

    Hero wins 12,078 ( lost -7,436 )
    BTN wins 14,922 ( won +7,486 )

  • final hand;
    No Limit Holdem Tournament
    $1.00+$0.20
    2 players

    Stacks:
    Hero (BTN) (12078)
    BB (14922)

    Blinds: 200/400 Ante 25

    Pre-flop: (650, 2 players) Hero is BTN 5 5
    Hero raises to 1,200, BB goes all-in 14,897, Hero goes all-in 10,853

    Flop: Q T Q (27,000, 2 players)

    Turn: 3 (27,000, 2 players)

    River: A (27,000, 2 players)
    BB says “gg”

    Final Pot: 24,156
    Hero shows: 5 5
    BB shows: Q 9

    BB wins 27,000 ( won +12,103 )
    Hero lost -12,053

I need to figure out if they were good shoves/calls or not. TBH I prefer to play the HU stage without too many of these – I’d rather see a few flops and whittle down their chips over a coin flip shove…


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