Dangers of pokertracker stats

[surfdoc]

I was halfway through your post but couldn't finish because I just realized my RFI (raised first in) percentage was too low, my WtSD too high, and my W$SD was therefore starting to suffer so I need to go make some adjustments.

I am sorry, what where you saying...

[zombies kill]

i think the majority of pokertrackers usefullness is the effects it has in the initial few months. its great for showing obvious statistical leaks, but if the player is competant enough and fixes those shown leaks, then i think a lot of the effectiveness is done away with. past that point it mostly becomes a record keeping device

[afk]

Great post Paluka. I think one of the most underrated (by a lot of players now) features of PokerTracker is the hand replayer - there isn't enough hand replayer love these days.

Unfortunatly I think there are a lot of players on theses forums that rely too much on PT stats (or maybe I just dislike stats posts too much). Let your play determine your numbers, not your numbers determine your play.

[jgorham]

Deleted

[goodguy_1]

[ QUOTE ]
I think one of the most underrated (by a lot of players now) features of PokerTracker is the hand replayer - there isn't enough hand replayer love these days.


[/ QUOTE ]
So true..this is such an awesome feature.I use it but not enough..I keep on telling myself to use it daily to go over the prior days results-say screen the 20-30 hands where I lost the most money but it takes time.I agree that it is the most underutilized tool in PT but since it takes time people dont use it enough...we all are data freaks I agree Paluka good post.

[rory]

Someone in the HUSH forum one time said something like this:

stat alignment will not make you better at poker.

Something like that. That statement is a good summary.

[Onaflag]

I have to echo a lot of what is being said in this thread. I no longer use PT while playing and I no longer datamine. I use it for analysis of my own play and to keep track of my money. Sure, I look at my stats, who doesn't?

I came to the realization one day that I was playing poker against a person's numbers and not the person. I was focusing too much on how often they PFRed and what their VP$IP was and not nearly enough on the real-time data available right before my eyes.

What a relief. I feel 30lbs lighter and have gained an immeasurable amount of confidence as a result. My BB/100 has coincidently also increased, but I don't know at this point if it is attributable to losing PT while playing or just one of those great 10,000 hand runs. We'll see in a few months.

Anyway, I'm glad somebody came out and said this because I have been thinking it for a while now, just didn't have the cahones to say it on 2+2.

Onaflag...........

[Boltsfan1992]

[ QUOTE ]
I have a ton of friends in Atlanta, and a few weeks ago I was down there visiting. A lot of them are former Magic players and gamers in general, so of course over the past couple years they have all picked up poker. Me and my fancy NYC friends have been playing quite a bit longer than these guys, so some of the beginners in Atlanta wanted to pick our brains about poker strategy. At least that is what I thought they wanted at first. But after talking to them for awhile, it seemed they weren't interested in poker strategy. They were interested in pokertracker strategy!
Everything these guys talked about was in terms of pokertracker. They didn't want to know how to play poker, they wanted to know what their stats should look like. They would find all sorts of "leaks" in their game like "my aggro factor on the turn is too low" or "i'm losing too many showdowns". But if I said "give me an example of a hand you played badly", they couldn't do it. They never discussed hands, they just played poker and then looked at the stats later and compared. When they would come to a conclusion like "I need to wait until the turn to raise" more, I don't think they had any ability to determine which hands they should make that change on. I'm not sure if they really understood why it mattered.
Now that Nate the Great is posting equations to predict you bb/100, the obsession with stats continues. If someone posts tomorrow on 2+2 that the perfect, optimal, holy grail of PFR is 10.2%, how many pokertracker users are going to know which 10.2% we are talking about?

[/ QUOTE ]

It's funny - I was about to post something similar but couldn't find the right way to say it.

After hitting a HUGE lucky streak where I won absolutely everything I saw, and my stats showed how awesome a player I truly was, I forgot everything I learned about the effects of delusion.

One week later, I lost that huge win streak and dropped down a level to figure out what went wrong. My stats though said I was still a winning player - my bankroll said otherwise (I didn't blow it...I just lost more than I wanted to and knew something was very wrong).

I went to reread some books and to replay hands. After thinking that it was just bad luck...it was truly bad play. One can have the right stats, but the stats say absolutely nothing about how that particular hand was played - it's just numbers.

I returned to thinking about making the correct decision in that hand at that time. When it's over, well, there's a new hand with different situational concerns.

I was arguing with someone last year about some hockey game and team. Being the stats nerd, I rattled off all of the statistical variants that showed my team as the better one - he shot back, "Um...I don't care. The only thing that matters if my team won last night. Did they?" (They did that night...)

Everything must be held in balance - a difficult lesson I picked up last week.

BTW, when you wrote former Magic players, I thought you were writing about the basketball team and not the card game. [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

PB

[afk]

[ QUOTE ]
So true..this is such an awesome feature.I use it but not enough..I keep on telling myself to use it daily to go over the prior days results-say screen the 20-30 hands where I lost the most money but it takes time.I agree that it is the most underutilized tool in PT but since it takes time people dont use it enough...we all are data freaks I agree Paluka good post.

[/ QUOTE ]

Agreed. I feel the same way. I love it but I don't use it nearly enough. It usually takes at least one hand where I had a "what the hell do I do now?" decision to pull out the hand replayer and review some hands. But I always learn something when I do it.

[SA125]

Great post. I played live yesterday with a guy who played the players and the table maybe better than anyone I've ever seen. I don't think half the guys there recognized what he was doing. He was an excellent poker player and, if he was being recorded on tracker and his play viewed strictly online, he would've looked like a foolish maniac.