Adding More Vital Stats to the Game

Much is made of poker tracker and its ability to keep track of your opponent’s play as well as your own. It is good at providing useful quick diagnosis of skill and play types that have become associated with profitability. A fish of 40/2/1 is expected to lose money in the long run however a TAG of 18.5/6.6/2.6 is the 'moneybags' at the table. However despite the claims it had become apparent to me and i am sure many others that the categories of TAG and LAG provide almost nothing in the way of quantifying the broader spectrum of what it is to be a winning player.

The tools that are used to quantify LAG and TAG among others can only roughly quantify if you are a bad player. Why is it that no stats are kept on the most important thing in poker? The most important thing of all is a players ability to 'play at the margin'. A TAG might max out his trips when another player has a flush or not value bet middle pair on the river. If there were stats to be taken then these must be the most important beyond the elementary understandings of preflop and postflop play. I see players being criticized and belittled by 2+2ers as being fish all the time when they ask why they are not winning players. These players are not necessarily fish and many perhaps are TAGs and just don't play well at the margins. I myself am a TAG but i do not consider myself a winning player i am merely a break even player at 1-2 & 2-4.

If you go by the stats then all the players who are TAGs should be winning players. If you say that the stats do not tell the whole story then you are wrong... the numbers don't lie. However the alternative is that the essential stats are not being recorded and analyzed. This leads to my proposition.

1. Record stats for % won & money won (or lost) when you and your opponent both have top pair
2. Record stats for % won & money won (or lost) when you and your opponent both have better than top pair.
3. Along with that keep stats for money lost for big second best hands like TPTK vs better Straight vs. Flush etc. and accounting only for the streets when both hands are made.
4. Also keep stats on % won & money won when you and your opponent have 2nd pair or worse.

This is not totally smoothed out but i just wanted to get this idea out there. Thanks

-ChazDazzle

[mmmmmbrother]

why

i think you would need upwards of 10khands on your opponent for this to mean much

[Harv72b]

Why not just run a (friggin' huge) sample of various players' databases to determine the average amount won (in BBs) for each of those hands, on each level? You could then (theoretically) track your own progress and those of your opponents vs. this standard.

I.e., if you collected databases from established, winning players at a given level, set an arbitrary minimum # of hands (perhaps 30k) for the given level, and then averaged out how much each of them wins (or loses) with each final hand 1 pair or better, you could get a basic idea of what you should be aiming for when you end up with that hand. Over such a large sample, normal variance should even out.

You would of course have to keep a separate set of averages for each level (and ideally, each site) as your average earn can vary widely depending on the skill of your opponents.

[ihardlyknowher]

IMHO, there are much more important stats than this. The extra $ is made by being able to put your opponents on a narrow range of hands and acting or reacting accordingly. I would want stats that help me make this range as narrow as possible.

[mmmmmbrother]

your time bank will be gone by the first hand.