Excession’s Poker Tracker Tips - Part I: Introduction

by Excession

Poker Tracker (PT) is a fantastic tool for analysing your own and opponent's play.

Using PT you can store, filter, data-mine and replay all your online hands ever from all the most popular online sites.

You can also sit as an observer on Party Poker tables (up to 4 at once) or at UB tables (5 tables max I think) and log every hand played on these without playing yourself - this means you can check out the stats of prospective opponents (and indeed the make up of a particular table) in great detail before you sit down.

It works by using the 'hand histories' that the major sites will either write to your hard drive or auto-email you on request (it can either read these direct from your hard drive or request and download the emails for you if you have a pop3 email address).

In the case of UB it works by using a hand-grabber program to grab and write your hh to your hrad drive for you once you have clicked the 'hand histories' button at the relevant UB table and set the grabber to 'play'

If you're too cheap to pay the $55 to licence this you are likely throwing money away over the long-haul.

Go and browse around the PokerTracker site and download the software (you can use it to store 1000 hands as a free 'demo' version)

The software is based on MS Access and you can configure it to mine all sorts of data. The main problem new users come across is 'where do I start?'.

I'll try to save you a bit of trial and error and suggest what are the most important things to look at in your data as you collect it.

Hand Histories

You will need some hand histories to play around with the filters and other features and get the hang of them. If you don't have any feel free to download some observed ones from Party (see below as to how to do this)

Tournaments, Ring Games and Aliases

You will see that Tournaments (both SnG and MTT) and Ring Game hand histories are kept in distinct databases. Using the 'alias' feature you can consolidate all your data for Ring or Tournaments across your various sites and limits - so you usually end up with just two databases - one with all your Ring Hands in and one with all your Tournaments Hands - irrespective of site.

Filtering and Sample Sizes

Generally the more you want to filter the bigger your sample size should be to get a statistically useful sample. If you have 10,000 hands and filter just those where you put money in you would be down to about 3000 straight away for example (maybe 4000 if you play lots short-handed or SnG's).

For looking at a starting hand by position for example I guess you need 20+ instances to be statistically significant - therefore if you try to take just 10k hands and look at all the times you played 66 from 2 off the button cold calling a raise you probably won't learn too much- in fact I've just looked at my last 10k hands and can see that I've only been dealt 66 in that position 5 times in total and have never called cold called a raise from it - maybe I'm too conservative!

Keep track of wins and losses

Keep 100% accurate track of all your wins and losses and your win and loss rates. On the Preferences Page there are filters for the data across various levels, sites, times of the week and dates and by type of play (Limit, Pot Limit and/or No Limit games). When analysing ring games the Big Bets won/lost per 100 hands are shown on the Main (General) Page, and on the Session Page more specific info is given, including BB/hour and (under the details button) and ability to compare win/loss rates at different times of the week.

Analyse your starting hand selection

The general page shows full details of your success with each starting hand from AA down to 22. You can hover over the various columns to see what they all mean - e.g. VP$IP = % you voluntarily put money in the pot with this hand, PFR% = the percentage of pre-flop raises you did, WtSD = how often you went to showdown with it when you saw flop, and of course how much (by cash and by BB) and how often you won with it. You can also replay each individual hand (the replayer shows your opponents' hands if known - which includes instances when the cards where not actually shown at the table as the player lost on showdown and chose to 'muck').

The filter on the starting hands box allows you to filter hands by whether or not you put any money in, by specific list of hands or class of hands (e.g. pairs, suited connectors), the blind size (often useful for SnG's), by number of players at table or seeing flop, by the type of action pre-or post flop (whether any raises, check-raises etc.). You can set up as many individual filters as you like and save them. For example I have an 'always' play list of the hands I consider that I will play in an unraised pot from any position (such as AQo, 99, ATs, KQ etc.) and I have them filtered for 'put money in'.

If any aren't earning the return I expect, I analyse more closely, replaying them and filtering to see if I limped or raised and from what position I am playing them to find the 'leak' in my game. You can analyse results by position from the 'Position Stats' page. You can also look to see if you are over or under defending your blinds (a tricky area for most players). You just start by collecting in all your hand histories and filter by put money in (stuff you got a free ride from in the big blind could skew your results if you hit the flop - and there is no decision to be made if you can see a flop for free).

If you are playing SnG's where the no. of players change you should create separate filters for 10-7, 6-4 and 3-2 handed play.

Take a good close look at all the hands you play and which are winners and losers. Also look closely at the medium pairs (JJ-88) and the results for AK, AQ, AJ, AT and A9 and see how each of them compare.

You might see, for example that AQ and JJ are losing you money but AT and 99 (on the face of it, worse hands) are making you money. This could just be statistical deviation from a small sample size, but it could also be an early warning that you are overbetting (i.e. being too aggressive) pre-flop or are too unwilling to let go of these hands if the flop misses. The answer could be to play JJ more like 99 and see if it's profitability improves.

Overview your general tightness/looseness and passivity/aggression

Note: the latter both before and after the flop.

This can be done from the 'more details' button on the General Page. I would suggest aim for a VP$IP% (voluntarily put monies in pot) of no more than 30% and a post-flop aggression factor of over 2. Your pre-flop aggression is more easily seen from your PFR% (pre-flop raise%) - at least in NL I would suggest this being 5%-15%.

Data about your opponents

Once you start playing Ring Games then PT becomes even more important as it is a way of gathering data about your opponents.

You can do this in SnG's too of course but there it's not so useful as you rarely come across the same player twice, SnG's last a maximum of an hour, people's play changes as they 'switch gears', the blinds rise and players drop out.

But find a rock (very tight) or fish (loose/passive) player in a Ring game and they will most likely stay that way for the rest of that session and beyond.

After the game is over you can use PT to analyse how individual opponents play various sorts of hands.

You can filter for all the same stuff as you can filter your own data but are obviously limited given that you only know their hand if they went to showdown or showed it (which skews the information towards their good hands for obvious reasons). However you can replay any hand they have played, look at their overall win/loss stats, VP$P%, PFR% etc., hands won, showdowns won, filter them by minimum no. of hands played or by their VP$IP or PFR%'s.

You can make offline notes for exporting to the site's note files (which are kept on your local drive by the way). By using the 'export notes' utility (you must be logged out of the site and the rest of PT at the time) and clicking on the 'Advanced Export' button you can export specific sets of data into the note files for anyone you have come across before.

Using the 'Summary Page' you can compare the performances of all your opponents (and yourself) and set parameters for auto-labelling fish, maniacs, rocks etc. (personally I filter for at least 30 hands played and call a rock < 20% VP$IP, a maniac > 45% VP$IP + > 15% PFR% and a fish > 40% VP$IP and PFR% < 3%).

Here is a link to more suggested classifications which take advantage of the auto-categorize function. These are good suggestions for decent limit Ring Play.

I have adopted these but adjusted them slightly for the low level NL Ring play I play in (I define VP$IP > 40% as loose, VP$IP between 25-40% as slightly loose, and VP$IP of < 25% as tight, a PFR% of 7 or more as pre-flop aggressive (with PFR 6 or less as passive) and post-flop Total Aggression (TOT-AF)of more than 1.2 as aggressive and 1.2 or less as passive.

I also keep special priority icons for maniacs and calling stations.

My NL categorisation guide is set out in detail in part II of this article.

Table selection

When you are next on the site looking at tables you will be able to hunt out the fish easily - this is worth a huge amount of money over a few months' play and can alone turn you into a consistently winning player from a break even one.

With the new ability at Party/Empire tables to get good stats on up to 4 current tables as an observer before you even sit down using the import observed hands feature direct from thehard drive there is even less reason to play
anywhere else for the moment (they already had the most players, easiest reload bonuses and worst standard of play). (Although the ovious alternative is now UB which thanks to the free add-on hand-grabber has moved from being the worst major site for PT use to the joint best)

Typical usage of PT during a session

This is how I approach a typical NL Ring session at Party:

Sit down at PC; log into Party, fire up PT (having previously set up auto-rate rules to rate others after 20 hands according to my suggested auto-rate rules), find 4 tables that look promising - no more than 2 big stacks, medium-high pot averages and enter them as observer.

Go into 'File'-'Auto-import...set-up' menu and set download hand histories from hard drive (C:/Program Files/PartyPoker usually). I usually do this every 2 minutes (I have a slightly 'fragile' PC), though you can do it every 1minute if you prefer- if for some reason you have set autorate to rate yourself as well then you should probably make it 2 minutes in case it takes longer than 60 seconds to import and upsets the system. Click 'OK'.

An auto-import window will now open. Check the option 'auto-rate platers when importing..' Click the 'Configure Import of Observed Hands' button. I leave both the bottom boxes unchecked. The hand histories are imported from the same folder as before (C:/Program Files/PartyPoker) unless you have set up PT to write them elsewhere under the 'move processed files option' (you might want to keep observed files separate for data sharing with friends without showing your own stats for example)

Now go away for 30 minutes - or browse BET-THE-POT Forums or play a Turbo SnG at PokerStars or something... ;-)

Come back - fire up Gametime Plus (GT+) - select as the player in GT+ one of the players at a given table - pull up that table on screen - lo and behold the stats and player-ratings for that table come up! If you like the look of the table then go on the wait list for it.

If not move onto the next one. You can select only the juiciest tables and never need to go into a ring game cold (with no reads on your opponents) ever again!

Sure if someone has just joined and you have never seen them before you have no read - but apart from that you have good stats on all the players at your table from the first hand onwards.

Review each of the 4 tables with GT+ (changing the relevant player each time then back to you at the end). If you don't find enough good tables, just repeat the process in the background whilst playing the ones you do like. I find that both myself and the my PC are happiest running with 3 tables, PT and GT+ running - 4 seems to upset the system a bit and I crash occasionally- but if you find you can handle 4 at a time (the Party maximum) with no problem then more power to you.

You can track the data for your entire Ring table in real time while you are at it using PT's Game Time Window (GTW) feature (or even better you can use the brand new and free add-on Gametime+ as it actually overlays info on each screen window rather than requiring you to open a separate GTW - GT+ is also better as it shows more data in particular the name of the autorate category for that player (no more having to remember which playstyle you have assigned each of the 14 icons to) and includes post-flop aggression stats for each player. You can alsa drag the data overlaid with GT+ around the screen (just click and drag) so you can set it up excactly how you want.

The basic procedure for using GT+ is outlined above. For those few sites where GT+ doesn't work you will be using the old-style GTW or, as GT+ is only for Ring games, if you want to track data on opponents (in an MTT for example) you will be using the equivalent Tourney Time Window (TTW). The next few sections tell you how to do this.

As soon as you join a table use the auto-request for hand histories utility to request hands every 5mins or so (10 hands/table played/5 minutes should be enough) and open one GTW/MTT for each table you are playing on. (Make sure you are opening a GTW for Ring and a TTW for MTT's).

At PS and some other sites, you will not get hand histories for hands where you are sitting out waiting for the button to reach you before you pay your first ante by the way. After the email is sent import the hand history into PT using the 'import' function under the file menu or the first button on the toolbar ( this takes about 15 seconds). On the PokerRoom site this is now fully automated - you just click and play.

Once you have got even one hand history for a current table you can set up that table in the GTW/TTW using the 'Preferences' button in it. I arrange the GTW/TTW in order of VP$IP so the loosest players are listed first and the rocks last. After about 20 minutes (or about 2 rounds of the table) you get a pretty good idea who is who. The most important stats are VP$IP and PFR% and then who is winning and losing the most!

Every time you import hand history emails from then on the GTW/TTW will refresh automatically. In NL Ring I like to see at least 2 players with ViP% over 45% at my table. If I've played for 30 minutes and I'm not in significant profit and the table is full of 30%-20% ViP's with no obvious fish then I'll leave and find a more lucrative table. At Party of course - I will know the table consistency before I sit down (see above).

If you are not sure of what type of table suits you, then you can use PT to cross-reference good sessions against the relevant GTW to see what textures of table you do well at at which don't suit your style of play.


I often end up playing two or more tables at once and have a split personality - on one my GTW might show me that there are 3 maniacs battling it out with 40% PFR% (so I'm not limping in with marginal hands from EP) and am mainly patiently waiting to trap them ('bear-hunt mode' I call it), the other is very passive and so I am throwing pre-flop raises and semi-bluffs around like I'm Gus Hansen (well OK maybe not quite that loose but it is working :)

This isn't always the most efficient BB/hr but it is good experience.

GT+ Notes

GT+ is better than the usual GTW as it shows more data; in particular the name of the autorate category for that player (no more having to remember which playstyle you have assigned each of the 13 icons to) and includes post-flop aggression stats for each player.

You can know see all the stats on your opponents if you hover over them but can also select those stats you want on permanent display for all players! I have VP$IP%/PFR%/Post-Flop Aggression/ Went to Showdown% in small font (yes you can choose and alter the fonts) visible at all times for all players at my tables.

About PokerTracker

The guy who developed PT is called Pat and he is continually adding new features (which are free for registered users).

The genius who developed GT+ and the UB hand-grabber as free add-ons is 'kross'.

If you have any issues or (as happened to me) a hard disk crash wipes your installed version (fortunately I had kept my hand histories backe up on CD - and I would recommend you do too) just email him or post on the PT forum and he will sort you out very quickly (I was up and running within the day).

I have no financial interest whatsoever in PT by the way, it's just a great product.

--excession

You can find excession on our forums.

Look out for more detailed PokerTracker tips or post any PT queries in this forum area.