What are important stats?

[Zjak]

Hello,

I'm a new poker player from Belgium and I have a few questions about what stats I should look at when analysing my play. As I don't really want to invest any money in poker, I use pokercharts as this service is free. I play .05/.1 no limit games. I haven't logged too many sessions in there, but I am already wondering what stats I should look at when I've logged enough hours.

Is ROI important, what about average win rate? How should I educate myself besides reading this forum?

I hope to get some info to try and get my poker "career" going.

Zjak

[dgoldsmith]

[ QUOTE ]
Hello,

I'm a new poker player from Belgium and I have a few questions about what stats I should look at when analysing my play. As I don't really want to invest any money in poker, I use pokercharts as this service is free. I play .05/.1 no limit games. I haven't logged too many sessions in there, but I am already wondering what stats I should look at when I've logged enough hours.

Is ROI important, what about average win rate? How should I educate myself besides reading this forum?

I hope to get some info to try and get my poker "career" going.

Zjak

[/ QUOTE ]

It would seem to me that "don't really want to invest any money in poker" and "try and get my poker 'career' going" are almost mutually exclusive.

You can learn from reading forums like 2+2 and ITH but books like SSH, HEP, TOP and others (even non 2+2 books /images/graemlins/wink.gif ) contain a lot of very good information. You might find some at a library or a friend might have one of them but buying the books for yourself would seem to be a worthy investment.

PokerTracker would probably be a good investment as well. You can try the eval version for databases with up to 1000 hands. I just started playing online 2 weeks ago and bought PT after the 2nd day -- its worth it.

[Zjak]

I think I might try pokertracker aswell, but paying 70$ for software now with my bankroll at only 100$ is just too much. I will certainly ask some poker friends to use one or some of their poker books to try and get some academical advice.
I'm currently playing with some free $ the site gave me and built it from 10$ to almost 100$. I'll try to reach the 500$ mark and then move to a different site, hopefully that goal will be reached before june 30th, when school is over.

I still would like to know what stats I should look at on pokercharts though as the trial of pokertracker will only last for 20 hours played.

Thanks already for the advice.

Zjak

[Evan]

is poker tracker $70 now? it used to be $55

[Zjak]

My bad, think I mixed it up with pokeroffice. Doesn't really matter what it costs though, i won't spend half my bankroll now on it, but I may certainly buy it when I start doing better.

[dgoldsmith]

I'd at least go get the eval version and use it until you get 1000 hands. Not sure if you can create new databases or prune database with the eval -- if you can't, you can always uninstall/reinstall to get more 'practice' time.

From reading the forum and books, I'd say the first 3 stats to look at would be VP$IP, PFR and Agg-Total.

If your VP$IP is over 30, your playing very loose. Between 20-30, semi-loose. Under 20 is good. 15-17 is great.

If your PFR is under 5, you are playing passive, checking and calling much more than betting and raising. Over 7.5 is considered aggresive. In between is so-so.

Agg-Total looks at your aggression level after the flop. Under 1.5 is passive, 1.5 is aggressive.

Take a look at this post for information about rankings based on these 3 stats.
Bison's Rules (http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Number=923884&page=&view=&sb =5&o=)

[pro20050]

My advice would be to read, read and read before you actually starts to play. Try to get a hang of the logic behind why to play certain ways depending on the game state. THEN play low limits and purchase a hand analyser (PokerTracker, PokerOffice etc) and you will be on your way to some easy cash...