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.
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