Cure for boredom and game selection issues

[Warren Whitmore]

Over the past few weeks I have noticed a few posters asking questions about how to fight off boredom and also a few asking about game selection. If you begain using the following method of game selection you will never be boered again as you will not have time.
On a seperate computer (This can be a 286 or similar junk available at your local junk yard) start a spread sheet labeled poker. Label the 3 spreadsheet tabs as Schoonmaker, 3rd street, and data base.
Lets start with Schoonmaker. Label the columns from left to right Name,Stone killer, Rock, Mainiac, Calling station, sum,repeat, then aggressive, passive, loose, tight. Here is how it works. Type in everyone's name in your game. Watch how everyone involved in the hand playes (skip those hands in which you are involved as you wont be able to keep up). Then put a number in each column at the showdown as to which catogory those players involved played the hand. Note: You will need the advanced series library handy as you will need to be able to look up plays fast (This will improve your own play as well after you look up the same thing a few times you will remember it. also it is not self weighting as you will be looking up th e more common plays more often than the obscure ones. Most of what you need can be found in the question & answer section.)If other hands are played before you have a chance to analyze the play skip them quality is far more important than quantity here. Or as Steinbeck put it in of mice and men "The only thing worse than not knowing things is knowing things wrong"
As an example in the sum column have it talley the number of hands the person in question played to showdown. In the second stone killer column have the number of stone killer hands played divided by the total number of hands expressed as a percentage. Do this all the way across the columns when you get to aggressive have it add the stone killer column and mainiac column for the tight the rock and stone killer etc.
20 Rows down have a sum of the sums, this will give you the percentages for the specific game you are playing in right now. Within 10 minutes you will know wheather the game meets with your profitability profile or not.
Now the 3rd street tab:
Note the # of people who voluntarily put $ into the pot including you. This simple exercise is more important than it sounds. alot of people try to correlate players in on 3rd street and pot size when selecting games. This is useless information because they tend to cancel each other out. You need % of stone killers, rocks, mainiacs, calling stations, and # of players in because then you can derive correlation coefficients and slope analysis later on for your individual style of play. There is a big difference between a huge pots because a couple of maniacs are in the game and one that is large because 50% of the players are limping along to the river.
*1)Lastly at the end of each hour enter all of this data into the worksheet "data base" We will come back to this shortly
Now after 500 hours of play you will have something useful. The first thing and most important for game selection make a graph of the schoonmaker worksheet. It is easyest to do by plotting the aggressive passive tight loose groups as this will put the rock etc in the coners. The regular players will have about 5000 data points each by now. Block out the 2 sigma types and bold them on the graph for each catagory. This will help you in game selection prior to seatting the future. Going off on a tangent for a moment: You may find that over time people don't change much. I was expecting to see the regular players moving towards the stone killer area, what I saw instead was if someone was playing 78% stone killer at first after many hours they were playing 78% stone killer.
Another observation is that the better holdem players were also the better stud players. Another observation was that going from 5:10 Hold'em to 10:20 holdem there was no difference in the percentage of stone killers (55% in each case) going from 5:10 7 card stud hi low split 8 or better to 10:20 it was huge (50% to 88%). If you average the number of good hands for regular players they are much higher percentage wise than the number of good hands for people who only play infrequently. Lots and lots of correlations and I am sure that you will discover many more.
*1) But enough about them lets get back to you, on that 3rd work sheet data base is where the information really starts to come together. Label the colunms as follows (this is mine I am using for an example yours may be modified to fit your situation)
Day of month, Time, Initial, delta, series, session, limit, OH, Caffine, Stone killer, Mainiac, rock, calling station, Average number of players voluntarily putting $ into pot, number of players at table, mistakes, split, Game, Type of mistake, sum, average. Every 100 hours run a correlation study on these numbers (found under the tools tab) and look for any correlation of 0.3 or greater and don't stop looking until you find the answer and you apply it.
I will share one of mine from each:
1)Day of month: correlated with delta and calling stations.
Hypothesis: alot of bad players are payed monthly, they tend to play more at the begaining of the month which has a positive affect on the delta(win rate).
2.)Time:The games tend to be bigger and better as the evening progresses.
3.)Initial:My bankroll is positivly correlated with series this is a good thing, I am still on the learning curve. Also amount on table correlated with win rate. This one took me quite a while to figure out. After much research the answer was found in the Berkman test. Under normal conditions (focus on practical matters, get things done, combine these activitis with record keeping, organize, while also focusing on controlling, focus on the task at hand, careful, concentrative, low key, detached) when under stress (anti social, sensitive to criticism, disorganized, self protective, evasive). I think you can see why I fall apart with insufficient funds.
Delta:very negativly correlated with mistakes. Nobody likes to make mistakes. Lets be realistic though if I didn't make lots of them I would be playing alot higher than I am. Much to my shock when I started measuring these and recording them they averaged about 2 an hour. In a way I was pissed at myself but in another way I figure if I can eliminate these it would do wonderful things to my win rate. So I set out to eliminate them. I have failed miserably in this area and so have set myself up rather like pavlov's dog. If I dont make any mistakes for a full hour I play my favorite album. For every mistake I make I sit out and do 100 pushups. I got this idea from Sklansky's poker gaming and life book. I am not making any fewer mistakes but if I ever get into a situation where I need to do alot of push ups I am all set. Besides my max bench press has gone up to 325 pounds for a 40 year old 135 pound guy that aint bad. I havent given up yet and I never will. I never thought the hardest player to control would be me.
Series: I am happy to report that throughout the series my win rate has improved (all those pushups must be doing something)
session lenth:Very sad I need a one hour break after each 4 hours of play or my win rate dips below my acceptable leval.
Limit:My win rates correlate positivly to 15:30 then go negative.
OH: Alcohol consumption had a positive effect on my win rate to 3 beers than a negative effect from there on. This of course was compleatly unacceptable. For 3 beers to have a positive influence on my win rate would have to mean that I was not playing optimally with zero beers. It also correlated with my ability to play in short handed or aggresive games meaning I was not playing aggresivly enough without the 3 beers. I turned up the aggressive knob one notch. Problem solved.
Caffine: No correlation with anything.
Stone Killer: I play well against them. This makes sense as most of what I know I learned from the advanced series and that is what they were written for I do need to study the how to play in loose games a bit more though.
Mainiac: My arch enemy these guys pull more $ off of me than any other group. They beat me up particulary badly in texas holdem and Omaha high low split especially when short handed. I have admitted defeat for the present I dont play if there are 2 or more mainiacs in a full game or at all in short handed games.
Rocks:I make $ off them though not much.
Calling stations: I make $ off them.
Average number of players seeing 3rd street:the more the merrier especially in full games.
# of players in game : I do better in a full game.
mistakes:I seem to keep making the same ones over and over calling with a razz hand in 7 card stud high low split 8 or better, calling with pocket kings when an ace flops in texas holdem where several people play ace anything.
Well there you have it game selection made easy. Just derive the slopes for the percentage of stone killers for any given limit that you need to meet your win rate criteria, mix in the number of people voluntarily putting $ into the pot on 3rd street, and salt and pepper in the stuff from your data base and you are all set to go.

I dont know about you but I don't have time to be bored.

I make no claims to correct spelling of anything expressed or implied.

[mdlm]

Warren,

Another superb post.

One quick question: Ignoring the no-more-boredom advantage is there any other reason to maintain the database in real time? It would seem to me that creating the database from hand histories would be more accurate and would allow time for analysis and reflection.

Also, do you have any examples of players who radically changed their playing style over time in a permanent way? Is the database sensitive enough that it can detect when players go temporarily on tilt?

[Warren Whitmore]

Hi Mdlm,
Thanks for the compliments. The answers to your questions are yes and yes. By keeping track in real time you can tell if a person is on tilt because you can compare how they are playing at present with how they have played in the past. I know this may seem hard to believe, it certainly is for me: I havent seen anyone improve very much. I strongly suspect this is not the case at the higher limits. I still remember a quote from wall street wizzards where this top trader is asked "what can a losing trader do to improve thier results?" and he answers "Nothing thats what winning players do".

[bad beetz]

Do you think you could write a game selection program to mount on top of the pokerlog software, it's definitely possible. Might be profitable.

The program reads the games and players involved, checks your poker log, and does whatever computations necessary to provide a rating for the game.

[SittingBull]

mental energy with your method. Why not close your eyes and imagine that u are on an island with a beautiful sexy woman?
U will be much more relaxed and not be bored.
Happy pokering,
Sitting bull

[Warren Whitmore]

Sadly I know nothing about computer programing. That is more an exuse than an answer I will learn.

[Warren Whitmore]