[GrunchCan]

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(all else being equal), stats can be very useful.

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True, but all else is not equal in practice, in my experience.

An illustration. A new SSNL poster comes to the forum and posts his stats. They are thusly:

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Hands: 350
VPIP: 35
PFR: 5
BB/100: 65


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He asks if his winrate is sustainable, and do his stats look ok. What is your reply?

The only correct response is: "your sample is too small." VPIP converges quickly, that's true enough. But even it needs more than 350 hands to indicate a pattern. If he even played 10 fewer hands, his VPIP goes down to 28. Not only is it possible that our Hero got 10 more pocket pairs over 350 hands than is usual, it's not at all unlikely.

But now when we play live, we tend to evaluate our opponents based on even smaller samples. PA will tell you an opponents stats over as few as 10 hands. But those numbers have no meaning whatsoever. Every one of us could fine numerous contiguous blocks where our VPIP over 10 hands was either 100 or 0. What does that tell you of the quality of your play? What does it say about your tendancies? The answer is: nothing.

I might seem a little extremist on my harping here, but I've said many other things before that at first got a negative response. After a while, I think you'll see I'm right.

To take this one step further, I'll issue a challenge to all SSNL posters. Uninstall PokerAce (or whatever gizmo you use) for 5,000 hands. Continue to use PokerTracker to automatically import your sessions, but don't use any stats when you play.

If you do this for 5,000 hands, I predict you'll find 2 results:

1) You play fewer tables at once.
2) Your game will noticably improve.

This is a challenge, not a contest. No rewards except those you earn for yourself.