Diagnosing a poor win rate.....

[DpR]

Fold to river bet 36%, too high?

[tech]

Quite a bit lower than most actually. Typically you see this between 40% and 45%. I am at 39% and I think I pay off too much. However, in general a low number here means one of two things:

1. You could be tossing hands too early (folding too much) and not seeing enough rivers.

2. You could be paying off too much on the river (not folding enough).

Very helpful, wasn't I? We narrowed it down to exactly the two options you had before this. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[Bob T.]

I believe the statistics for one pair, also include hands where the board has one pair, and you don't. Anyway, behind high card, one pair is the smallest hand in poker, so it shouldn't be a big winner.

[DpR]

If I was tossing hands to early wouldnt my WSD be too low?

I w/o checking again i think this stat was 31%. Additionally if I was paying off too much then WSD would be too high I would think.

Off course I am prolly folding the ones I should show down and calling the ones I shoudl fold lol......

[NotReady]

I'm currently in a monster losing streak myself, 320 BB at PEP 2/4 and also Pacific, about half and half, over 165 hours. I had a 220 BB drop 2 years ago over about 80 hours. Until this last losing streak, I had climbed all the way up to $4.50 per hour, now down to about $3.00. I spend more time analyzing numbers than playing.

One thing I did recently was make a spreadsheet showing how often I'm getting each hand and what my win rate per hand is, then comparing that to what I should be getting and what I should be winning. I ball-parked what I should be winning by using Texas Turbo Holdem. What I found was that I'm losing with most of my good hands, but especially with hands that have A and/or K, and then id'd the worst(AKo,AQs and some others). I then replayed all hands that are big losers and found very little I would do differently. The numbers show I'm not getting the good hands as much as I should, and I'm losing with them or not winning near what I should be - usually because I don't flop with two bigs. Oddly, all pairs, 99-AA, are performing as expected. 22-88 are way underperforming.

I then did a second analysis which involves determing how often I should be getting the strong hands, 2 pr - full house, my win rate with them, and compare that to how often I should get them and expected win rate. I determined this from my .5/1 stats, for which I have over 300 hours and a good win rate. I found my win rate with the strong hands is fine, but I'm getting them far less often than I should. This indicates I'm not flopping sets, and I'm missing lots of straight and flush draws - which confirms what I suspected just from memory.

One final area that stuck out was blind results. I'm losing far too much in the blinds, especially the big blind. So I reviewed tons of BB hands. I found what I already knew - I'm not flopping hands with garbage as often as I should - and this accounts for more of the loss than not getting good cards, though that's part of it.

What are your totals at 5/10? Total hours and total money?

One other thing, I think your SD is very low. I don't play the 5/10 6 on PEP (yet), but have about 150 hours of 1/2 and also about 200 hours of 1/2 and 1/2 pound on IC. My SD there runs 15-18, but is usually about 11 in full games. I have had unusually low SDs before, and it has always indicated not getting cards, both full and 6 max. I do think your VIP is a touch low and PFR also, but not by a whole lot, but I don't think that's the source of the problem.

I got so ticked at this recent losing streak I finally did something I wanted to do for a long time. I combined all my online results for all limit holdem in terms of BBs and hours, chronologically. The result was 6300 table hours, winning about 1.4 BB/hr. The graph of this looks almost like a straight diagonal, the several 200+ BB drops I've had, and even the current monster, look very innocent.

It really sounds like you're getting cold decked, which can go on for much longer than most people realize.

[StellarWind]

[Blarg]

Supposedly went on for a solid two years straight for Puggy Pearson, and he's regarded as one of the all-time greats.

[balkii]

[ QUOTE ]
Hi,

Hand #1: Your getting raised by bigger flushes and FH's also, but you still bet when they call your 3 bet. A bigger flush that wasn't the nut might not 4 bet it due to the paired board or the fact they don't have the nut flush. Also, you were in the SB, they can't be faulted for thinking you have Q6/Q4 in an unraised pot.

Now think about what hands call your bet on the river. unimproved trips is about it. The other hands that call beat you almost all the time.

So check/call when the board is paired and you have a baby flush on the river and your raised on the turn and they call your 3 bet. This is the problem of being out of position in marginal situations like this. You can't maximize your winnings only your losses.

Hand 3: If he's that bad he'd 3 bet you with K bad kicker and then still call the turn, value bet the river. I never value bet the river with 1 pair out of position, I always just check/call because when your ahead you rarely get called, and when your behind you lose 2BB not 1BB to see the showdown. Sure I miss a value bet here and there from a complete calling station, but you usually make those bets up by just having them at the table.

Thanks,
MarkV.

[/ QUOTE ]

I am sorry, but this is pretty bad advice, especially the part in bold.

In hand 1, DpR played the hand just fine, unless he had a read as an opponent being super passive. I dont think he came close to overplaying this.

I never value bet the river with 1 pair out of position, I always just check/call

This is awful. You should really reread TOP "Heads up on the end." When you are in first position with a marginal hand, you typically only have two viable options, and they are betting out and check-folding. Check calling is by far the worst.

The reason for this is simple - most players call with more hands than they bet. So when you are head up on the river, if you check your marginal hand, your opponent will only value bet a better hand, and every time you call, you will lose (except the few times you snap a bluff). If you come out betting, your opponent will frequently just call (and not raise) with the same hands he would have bet (the hands that beat you), but he will also call with hands you beat. So clearly you make more money by betting.

I suspect you dont value bet nearly enough. On a 889KA board today, where I had raised preflop, I got called by 53o. I guess I might have been bluffing.

[Blarg]

[ QUOTE ]
This is awful. You should really reread TOP "Heads up on the end." When you are in first position with a marginal hand, you typically only have two viable options, and they are betting out and check-folding. Check calling is by far the worst.

The reason for this is simple - most players call with more hands than they bet. So when you are head up on the river, if you check your marginal hand, your opponent will only value bet a better hand, and every time you call, you will lose (except the few times you snap a bluff). If you come out betting, your opponent will frequently just call (and not raise) with the same hands he would have bet (the hands that beat you), but he will also call with hands you beat. So clearly you make more money by betting.

I suspect you dont value bet nearly enough.

[/ QUOTE ]

I agree that he may not value bet enough.

But I think you're applying a lot of rules in a way that seems almost iron-clad, which is a problem, and also they seem to apply to higher limit or more "sensible" games than a lot of nutty lower limit games. I agree with both you and TOP for the former games, but not 100% on the latter type of games.

In loose low limit games, people will often bet on the end if you check to try to steal the pot, even if their chance of doing so is very small. Perhaps even because they think the pair of kings, queens, or aces they put you on, which you raised with preflop or caught on the flop and then bet or raised with, are suddenly, especially when the board looks like someone might have a straight or a flush, not a good hand played well but merely a bluff that didn't pan out, like many of their own hands...and that even though you don't have the high pair or two pairs you represent, you'd be happy to pay off their low pair that you can't beat anyway just because...well, I don't know exactly why. I can only follow the thought processes of fools so far.

They also do a LOT of things for the fun of seeing whether they work or not, or because an impulse seizes them, or they want to be "clever."

Missing a big bet by not value betting on the end is a big thing in poker, but...a great many opponents bet when you check on the end, some almost automatically. In such instances, it becomes almost automatically profitable to both check and to then call on the end after checking.

Losing a pot because you don't call a bluff bet on the end is a disaster it can take a long time to recover from. Losing pot after pot because you don't call habitual bluffers and bullies, which low level loose games are absolutely stuffed with, is going from disaster to disaster with rare interruption.

You're describing what thinking players do. I find I lose money a lot more when I assume many players are really thinking players. Because they're just absolutely not.

So by checking at the end, you very often are looking at saving the risk of being raised and losing two bets, while almost certainly getting the single bet you want and feel comfortable with if you don't have the nuts or a monster hand, especially if you are someone who has been playing hands selectively, releasing them here and there, have been on a losing streak, or are thought of as just tighter than the average table member(not hard to do at all on a 2/4 table, say).

Your scenario presumes the opposite, which is quite common in higher limit games where people don't try to steal nearly so often just "because they can" or because they have any number of crazy ideas going through their heads, and don't automatically assume someone not betting can is a fool or a coward or can be easily deceived or beaten, and therefore should be bet out against.

I tend to bet out much more often in tigher, higher-limit games on the end myself. Heck, I even raise sometimes with the worse hand on the turn, and even raising on the river with the worst hand works sometimes -- and if it's the only way to win, the likelihood of being called doesn't have to be very great to make that a positive play overall.

But that's a different game.

I'm just noting that in a great many lower-limit, loose games I've seen, a check on the end means someone bets into you automatically in response regardless of the quality of their hand. If you had intended to call their bet because of pot size, on general principle to maintain table image or create one, or because you think you actually have the best hand, then checking and calling on the end can often get the bet in there when you want it there and save you from a raise when you don't.

When to value bet out remains an additional but separate consideration, and that can depend more on reading an opponent and making an educated guess as to his hand than the particular rules you might apply to them when you assume they are sharp, consistent, logical players. This is often simply not the case -- and even very predictably so.

[balkii]

I agree there are many players like this, but in my experience (and I would think most others' too), most people still call with more hands on the end than they bet with.