[Pov]

I'll go ahead and answer pro-PT [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]. PokerTracker is essential for young player development in my opinion. Without PokerTracker it is just too easy to remember your wins, forget your losses and count your bonus whoring as wins. Spreadsheet or not. With enough discipline and record keeping you could keep track of these numbers on your own, but I imagine few players, particularly beginners actually do this. (The ones that do are probably the winners)

PokerTracker has on numerous occassions allowed me to correct significant leaks in my game. I agree that looking at minutia in your stats with small samples is rarely all that helpful, but that's not what I use PT for at all. One particularly fruitful excercise I recall was looking up medium suited connectors and discovering I seemed to be losing money with them. PT allowed me to find out why quickly and easily. It turned out I was playing them against smaller fields than I should have been (on average), mostly because I was limping in earlier positions than I should. I'm sure I was convincing myself at the time the table was loose and passive enough to do this, but the PT stats set me straight and made me realize I needed to up my standards. It made a big difference to my play. There are many such examples.

And if you're going to multi-table low limits it *does* help if you use it correctly and develop the proper intuitions. No, you should not base all your decisions on how this particular guy played his last 30 hands, but when a new player sits down and you know immediately he's a TAG or a fish despite not remembering him at all, that is huge. The ability to easily find tables with weak players and to easily determine whether a particular seat is a good one at a glance is of particular value to me and has paid for PT many times over. Following stats by rote I would not recommend.

If you only have $100 should you spend $55 of it on PT? No. I wouldn't go that far. But it would definitely be the first thing I purchased as a result fo bonus money. I think I would have developed much more quickly as a player if I had purchased it earlier. But only because I spend time actually *using* it and using it in a way that helps me to learn.

And finally, as another poster mentioned, you may not be able to determine your winrate accurately in 30K hands, but you can start to see a fairly accurate estimate of your VPIP, PFR, etc. within a few hundred hands and by the time you have a few thousand you know what your stats are. Knowing if these are in the "good" range is only half the battle, but if you're out of range, this will let you know which direction and where to start looking. Sure, you could have perfect stats and be playing all wrong, but that is a lot less likely. If your VPIP is 28 after 1000 hands, I can pretty much guarantee you need to make some significant changes while it may *feel* like you're playing tight. How else would a person like this know?

Maybe what we should really be doing is helping beginners get the most out of a tool like PokerTracker beyond just reading the base stats, but I think it's going to be a pretty key tool for the majority of players who want to learn quickly.