Inside track

	Identify weak spots in your play and track your opponents

Price: $55
Web: www.pokertracker.com
Download a free 1,000-hand trial version of the software direct from the PokerTracker site

I’m guessing that, if asked, you’d describe yourself as a decent player. Maybe you’ve read all three volumes of Harrington on Hold’em, or Super/System, or maybe you’ve never read a book at all but instead have a few years – and a few thousand hands – worth of experience under your belt. But it’s a known fact that a lot of ‘decent’ players are either losing on a fairly regular basis (‘breaking even’ in card players’ parlance), or hitting relatively frequent periods when they’re losing and feel that this is just poker’s natural turn of the screw.

The real question, then, should be: do you make a consistent and regular profit? If not then there’s obviously room for improvement in your game. But if you’ve read all the books and played thousands of hands, just what exactly do you need?

These were the questions I posed myself in the middle of last year. I’d been playing poker for some years; I’d written a book on the subject – The Virgin Guide to Poker – and my playing style was what many consider to be the most effective: tight-aggressive.

I wasn’t actually losing – I spent all year playing with the £300 I invested into a bankroll at the start of the year. The only money I’d ‘invested’ after that was to move some of the funds won on Betfair to Full Tilt to take advantage of sign-up and reload bonuses. Sure, I was having fun, playing within my bankroll, going up a few hundred dollars here, dropping a few hundred there. But it seemed impossible to break through into regular profit.

It was at this point that I decided to take things a little more seriously and investigate a world that, up to then, I’d considered beyond me: poker software. I chose a product that’s generally considered to be the best that money can buy – Poker Tracker – and started using it. A few months later I decided to learn it front-to-back and use it religiously. And that’s how I transformed my return on investment from a paltry 0.5% to 11% over six months – the best week being 33% – and doubled my bankroll.

What is Poker Tracker?

At its most basic, the program enables you to import hand histories from games you’ve played in. Hand histories are fairly innocuous things that few of us can really be bothered with. And yet they contain crucial data concerning what you were dealt, hands revealed at showdown (regardless of whether your poker room automatically mucks them or not), what was bet, by whom and when, who won the pot and how much it was worth.

The biggest reason that hand histories are regularly ignored is that, to use them in their raw form, you have to note down which tournament or ring game you’re playing in, the hand you want to see – all of this while action at the table is still going on – and then dig through the hand history folder on your PC to replay the hand (mostly in your head, or using real cards as these are only text files).

Instead, with Poker Tracker, all this information is imported into a database for you to easily access individual hands and replay them visually. ‘Big deal! Is that it?’ I hear you say. True, if it was simply a method of visually playing back hands its value would be relatively insignificant. But it’s a far deeper and more professional application than that.

How is it going to help me?

The real usefulness of Poker Tracker materialises in two key areas: identifying weak spots in your play, and tracking (and rating) your opponents. Let’s look first at identifying those weak spots. For the purpose of this exercise let’s assume you have Poker Tracker and that you’ve imported a few hundred (or, preferably, thousand) hand histories.

When you first open Poker Tracker and click the Tournament – or Ring Game – Player Statistics button you will be presented with an area of windows packed with a mind-boggling array of data. You know this data should be of some use to you, but how? Step one is to establish exactly what kind of information you’re looking for, and this is done by clicking the Preferences tab at the top right of either Player Statistics window. This is important because not all games are the same. Poker Tracker automatically separates ring game stats from tournament stats, but you might want to look at data from a particular poker room, or a specific day, week, or any other time-span. You might also want to separate your MTTs from your sit-and-gos, or separate your limit cash games from your no-limit.

It’s worth mentioning here that you should review your play at least once a week. It’s one of those hoary old truths about the pros that they go over hands time and again in their head to work out either why they lost or, if they won, whether they could have massaged the pot more. That feat of mental agility is beyond most of us but, thankfully, with an application like Poker Tracker, you don’t even have to try. You only have to have the intelligence to commit half an hour a week to looking what went right and wrong that week.

Spot the mistakes

Once your preferences have been set, go back into the Player Statistics window. What you’re looking for now is those hands that might contain mistakes – in other words the hands you lost most money on. You can find these by going to the bottom panel entitled Known Starting Hands and clicking the ‘T$ Won’ tab twice. This will rank your hands by the blind levels, in order of which hands you lost most money on (the total lost will be shown in red). If you want to show all the hands played regardless of blind level, go to the panel above (Limit/Blind Structure Summary) and click the button ‘Show All Hands Regardless of Limit/Blinds’.

Look at the Known Starting Hands panel and you can find out which hands you’ve lost most money with. In my case it’s Q-Q! By clicking on a hand – the Q-Q link for me – you launch a new window on which you’ll find a Playback This Hand button. Click on this and you can run through each instance of your losing hands to find out where you went wrong, or got unlucky. And the amount of information you can unearth is amazing. You can repeat this process for all subsequent losing hands, making relevant notes as you go. And you might find some useful information – like you’re calling too much in the small blind with lots of limpers because it’s cheap rather than actually having any kind of a hand; or playing low suited connectors or A-x suited way too much. Reviewing your play in this manner shows that you might know things, but you’re not necessarily implementing them at the table.

Another common problem is the inability to fold pocket Aces and Kings when the board is warning you of danger. To discover whether you have this problem, you can slice the data further. In the General Info tab of the Player Statistics window, go to the Known Starting Hands panel and click the Filters button. In that pop-up check the ‘Went to Showdown and Lost’ button, then click okay to go back to the main window. If you have a problem folding A-A or K-K then these hands will show near the top of the list in the T$ Won window, and you can now review these hands.

If you have a tendency to play out of position, Poker Tracker will identify this too. Click on the Position Stats tab on the Player Stats window. This will tell you how much you’re winning and losing in each position. Click on the position you’re losing most from, then below in the Known Starting Hands window click T$ Won twice, and you’ll see the hands you lost most money from in that position. That’s me, what about my opponents?

The more you play, the more data Poker Tracker will gather, not only on you but on your opponents too. This means that when you meet a player you’ve played before, you will already have information on whether he was tight/loose, passive/aggressive, whether he chases hands to showdown, how successful he is when he does that and so on. In other words, it’s like knowing a player’s reputation and style before he’s even tossed in his ante. I’m now going to show you how best to gather and use this knowledge for both tournaments and ring games.

Cash cow

At least two hours before you’re going to play a ring game, open as many tables as you can at the level at which you want to play. You need to be able to do this on a site which allows you to gather hand histories as an observer (check on Poker Tracker’s forums to find out which site allows what). Next, open the window you use to import your hand histories and start the timer. Poker Tracker will now gather up the hand history every minute of every table you have open for as long as it remains open.

About 15 minutes before you play you can use the feature called Auto Rate Players (in the Utilities drop-down menu) which automatically rates every player that’s played at least 30 hands and assigns them a rating such as fish, rock, maniac and so on. With some poker rooms you can even import this information straight into the player notes within the actual poker room. You can then choose the fishiest table to play at by looking at the player notes at each table. If your poker room doesn’t allow this, there is another method. Launch the Game Time window and simply enter the players’ names (Poker Tracker has an auto-complete function). The Game Time window will show the player’s rating, and give statistics such as how many times he voluntarily puts money in the pot (VP$IP%, indicating tight/loose play).

How valuable is this? Imagine this. It’s the second hand and you’re in the small blind holding A-10s and everyone checks round to the button who raises three times the big blind. Is this a steal or does he hold a genuine hand? You already know that stealing the blinds in a ring game is less important than in a tournament – but does he?

By looking at the Game Time window you see that his VP$IP% is 34% – in other words, he’s relatively loose and the chance that I’m facing a premium hand is less than if I was facing a tight player. I can also see that he attempts to steal the blinds 35% of the time.

A call might be in order here but you don’t really want to get into a three-way pot with A-10s. But by looking at the big blind’s stats in the Game Time window you can see that he folds his big blind to a raise 80% of the time. With the raise, and your call, it’s likely that he will fold anyway. So a call looks reasonable. Had you discovered that the button was tight (VP$IP% < 24%) with a low propensity to steal, while the big blind doesn’t fold his blinds often, it’s more likely your A-10 suited is going into the muck.

Other statistics will let you know how aggressive or passive the player is, giving you an idea of how strong his hand is after the flop. If you see that he’s passive and he then bets post-flop you can be pretty sure he has something, making your decision to raise, call or fold much simpler, depending on whether you’ve hit your hand.

Tournaments

Clearly tournaments are different because you can’t join one two hours into the game. But there are other ways of tilting the information scales in your favour, particularly with MTTs. Another key difference is that the Auto Rate function doesn’t work here, for the simple fact that in tournaments players loosen up as the blinds increase. Poker Tracker, therefore, doesn’t have a standard base from which to establish what kind of player your opponent is.

Before a tournament starts, follow the same process of setting up the hand history import timer and opening the Game Time window. Then, as soon as play begins, note which table you’re on and open as many others as you can, hiding them in the tool bar at the bottom of the PC desktop. The number you can open will depend on which poker room you’re playing at, and the capabilities of your PC but 10 is a good starting point. As each table breaks up, open a new one until there are no more to open. What you’re now doing is observing as many people’s playing habits as you can and storing that information for when you are moved to a table or when new players join yours. Fill in the Game Time window with the relevant player names and simply type in the new names as other players arrive at your table.

This is a very powerful tool at any stage, but particularly when the field has thinned to the last 20-25% when you’ll have an excellent knowledge of each player’s tendencies.

But is it ethical?

Of course, you might consider all this ‘cheating’. You might also believe that using such software will make you soft in live games when you don’t have access to it. But online poker is developing fast and the most successful players seek out every edge they can. Poker Tracker costs a flat fee of $55 (it’s also available for Omaha and Stud), although sometimes you might get it free by joining a particular poker room.

If your ROI level is around 0% and your bankroll is $200, you only need to earn an extra $4.58 a month for it to pay for itself, by increasing your monthly ROI to 2.3%. It increased mine to 11%. Essentially, it’s a no-brainer.