The Lucky Donut

Nope, nothing really interesting happened.  Still, it’s less than ten weeks before I’ll be in Vegas.. bear with me during the dark weeks 🙂

7. Pocket pairs

I play 93.6% of pocket pairs, and raise them preflop 43.3%.  I do have negative lines for 77, 66, 44 and 22 though.  I don’t see any major problems, just a few big pots I lost with a set against a rivered flush, or a full house against quads, etc.  I do still think I might need to dump small pairs in early position because I often struggle to get a big enough payoff when it gets raised ahead of me and I do flop a set.

8. Suited connectors

Profitable to the tune of 9BB/100.  I cold called with a suited connector only 12 times, mostly KQs and QJs.  Overall I lost, but it’s a pretty small sample size.  The hands I played were almost all only for a tiny raise and in position.  Doesn’t feel like there’s much wrong here.

9. Unsuited connectors

Leak.  Only a small one, but I’m losing 1BB/100 with unsuited connectors.  This includes AKo, which I’m nearly $90 down on.  That’s because of some big pots I lost with top pair vs a set or two pair.  I’m getting more confident playing AK now, and feel like I lose less when I’m beaten, so I expect this figure to improve.  I’ve cold-called unsuited connectors 11 times and won once.  Seven times it was with JTo and the one pot I did win was very small.  Mental note made.

10. Postflop aggression

Wow, I c-bet a lot.  After a preflop raise, I bet or raise the flop 77.8% of the time.  Is that too high, if the guide I’m referring to says "at least 40%"?  Well I don’t think so, because filtering my hands on just these situations, I’ve made 122BB/100 when I continuation bet and when they lead out and I get to raise, the win rate soars to a phenominal 191BB/100.  I can live with that.

My overall postflop aggression factor is 2.83.  Plenty.  However this is mostly from my flop play: 4.12 on the flop, 1.83 on the turn and 1.90 on the river.  It’s not exactly passive on the later streets, but I wonder if this shows that I slow down a little too quickly and could be betting and raising a little more.

11. Check-raising

I’ve check-raised 111 times, 1.11% in total.  Every one of them, naturally, felt great.  I’m not doing it excessively, and overall the hands where I’ve check-raised show my biggest win rate: 449BB/100.  Of course this figure is pretty meaningless, because I’m usually only check-raising with my strongest hands and by its nature a check-raise builds nice big pots.  Still, it looks good just to finish with such an impressive figure!

What better way to chill out at night when working away from home than to analyze your Poker Tracker stats?  I’d even set up GoToMyPc especially so I could get at PT and drill down whenever I felt it necessary to get into the nitty gritty of my play.

Well I thought it would be a good idea, but I crashed out after a heavy night of partying.  And by partying, I actually mean lugging server hardware from one floor of a datacenter to another.

Here’s the first part anyway.  I based the analysis on this guide, and answered each point in turn.  I’ll do the same thing after another 25k hands.

1. Do I have sufficient preflop aggression?

Apparantly not.  On the button and two seats behind I’m raising about half the hands I play, but everywhere else it’s lower.  I already think I play too many weak hands out of position so eliminating them would improve this figure – not by raising more, but by calling less.

2. Am I positionally aware?

Indeed I am.  My VP$IP figure on the button is 26.21, whereas under the gun it’s 13.13.  So I’m very close indeed to playing twice as many hands in the best position as in the worst.

3. How’s my stealing?

My attempts to steal the blinds figure is 33.55%.  When filtering my hands only for steal attempts, my win rate is $59 per 100 hands.  Not too shabby, and much more than double my overall win rate – in fact more than ten times bigger!  I think there are other areas I can look to improve ahead of this.

4. Defending the blinds

This is good and bad.  The magic number, so they say, is  a loss of 0.375BB/100.  Anything worse than this and you may as well just check/fold every blind.  My number is is virtually the same figure, but positive: 0.37BB/100.  It’s reassuring.  I don’t make money from the blinds overall (nobody does) but when I decide to pay to play from these positions, it’s been profitbale.  But it could be more profitable.  I’m at -0.46BB/100 when facing a blind steal.  Defend less, then.

5. Heads-up play

This was a pleasant surprise: I’ve won 7BB/100 when heads up going to the flop.  I certainly didn’t expect this figure to any higher than my overall win rate.  Continuation bets apparently do rock.  However, when I filter only the hands where I didn’t raise, it’s a loss of 6BB/100.  I’m not profitable when limping with weak hands.  Most likely it’s small pocket pairs and suited aces when I’m out of position (given that I already know I raise a wide range in late position) and I suspected this.

6. Multiway pots

I’m winning 5BB/100 in multiway pots overall, and 3BB/100 when limping.  Guess there’s nothing wrong with that.

This is already long enough, so I’ve split the analysis into two parts.  Two blog entries for the price of one – bargain!  Some may say it’s a cheap trick to make readers come back for more, but given the content is really all for my benefit and not at all interesting to anyone else, that’s hardly the case.  I’m just getting bogged down in all those lovely figures.

You never know, something interesting may happen that I just have to write about in the meantime.  Doubtful though.