PokerTracker: I commit heresy.

[SheridanCat]

"Buy Pokertracker to track your progress"

We give this advice to beginning online poker players all the time. I have to wonder if this is good advice, really.

Yes, yes, yes, it's important to know if you're playing too loose or too passive, or cold-calling more than once-in-a-lifetime, or getting the right distribution of pocket aces over 1000 hands or whatever. My question is whether it's a great idea to have a true beginner's nose stuck in all those statistics.

We claim that it's dangerous to be results oriented in poker. It's a game of the long run. Over the long run we know whether we're winners or losers, but the short term variance obscures it.

Yet, most people aren't 4+ tabling for 8 hours per day, so we get a sample size that is sort of small, really. Then we try to gauge our status and progress from that small sample size. There are 10s or 100s of stats one can look at in PT. Most of them won't really help us play better poker.

Even worse, once the normally, single tabler gets 10K hands in PT, he starts to think that maybe his game has changed enough that those early stats don't mean much. So he blasts the database and starts over. Rinse. Repeat.

I use PT, but I'm beginning to question it's usefulness for a regular Joe like me who only has about 30K hands in it. I only use it at Party, since it's so easy to get the hands in, and of course my live play isn't captured. I don't see the same players enough for it to be terribly useful for GameTime/PlayerView either.

Am I a moron for thinking a beginner just doesn't need PokerTracker? Wouldn't it be better to just track session results via a spreadsheet or StatKing and worry about PT when I'm ready to go pro?

I know poker is a game of imperfect information, so the better our information is the better we should be at the game. I'm just wondering if PT actually gives the average player better information or just more data points to confuse ourselves with.

Regards,

T