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

[manpower]

Good post, in fact I think you're probably right. If you're only going to be playing sporadically or at low limits (say < 1/2) or playing less a few hundred table hours per year, it probably isn't worth it to spend the $50 or so on the program, as that money would better go to building a bankroll (or buying beer). However, I think we should still recommend it to anyone aspiring to play at a semi-professional level or better. Once you get into playing poker as a source of income, poker tracker becomes a worthwhile asset.

If you're unsure whether to buy it, I say shell out once your bankroll starts getting into the $1500 range.

[Kurn, son of Mogh]

I used PT for 6 months and then stopped. My win rate dropped when I used it, and has increased since I stopped.

1) It didn't teach me anything about my play I didn't already know
2) I found I was making bad judgments based on the perceived tendencies of opponents based on stats from too small a sample set.

Disclaimer: I do not multi-table.

[JunkHead]

Hmmm, this seems to go against all advice I've read here on the subject. Why wouldn't it help the low limit players, exactly? Instead of thinking in terms of limits, maybe you should think in terms of Big Bets. I play low limits, but don't fixate on dollars and cents, rather I'm concerned with BB's. Even at low limits PT will tell me if I'm playing hands out of position, if I'm not aggressive enough, etc. I think PT is useful for ALL serious players and students of poker, regardless of the limits he or she chooses to play.

JunkHead

[SheridanCat]

[ QUOTE ]

Hmmm, this seems to go against all advice I've read here on the subject.


[/ QUOTE ]

Yep, that's why it's heresy. I mean, everyone knows PT is the cat's pajamas.

[ QUOTE ]

Why wouldn't it help the low limit players, exactly?
Instead of thinking in terms of limits, maybe you should think in terms of Big Bets. I play low limits, but don't fixate on dollars and cents, rather I'm concerned with BB's.


[/ QUOTE ]

Believe me, I think in BBs. Since I play 1/2 up to 15/30, thinking in dollars would be weird. However, I don't think my initial post has anything to do with dollars or BBs. I'm actually saying that PT can make people MORE results-oriented. In fact, people shouldn't be thinking in dollars or BBs until they have played a lot. Why? Because it doesn't mean much.

[ QUOTE ]

Even at low limits PT will tell me if I'm playing hands out of position, if I'm not aggressive enough, etc. I think PT is useful for ALL serious players and students of poker, regardless of the limits he or she chooses to play.


[/ QUOTE ]

To know if you're playing hands out of position, you really have to delve into the stats and even the, it doesn't tell you that. It tells you that you played a hand in a particular position, but it doesn't tell you anything about the game texture that could make that correct. Let's say you look and see you held AJo 20 times. Twice you played it UTG, once you raised and once you limped. What does that tell you? It tells me nothing.

After about 10K hands, PT rated me as Tight/Aggressive. I already know I was playing that way. I didn't really learn anything there.

I agree with Kurn that PT has a place, but it's not for the regular guy who plays one or two tables. A guy like davidross or another online pro absolutely must use PT, but the beginner will only be led astray or confused by the stats and the regular, casual player will really get nothing out of it.

Realistically, if you're not an online pro player, what do you use PT for?

The one thing I think PT is great for is hammering home how much you pay in rake. It's obscene and sickening to look at.

Regards,

T

[bholdr]

I aggree with you SC- but for slightly different reasons. the $50 doesn't really matter at all, especially since there are affiliates out there that give away PT for signing up through them (PSO, boogster etc)

I personally believs that the sample sizes that people on the forums constantly ask for are way too high. asking for 10k+, even 50k+ hands, may be correct in determining winrate, but i think much smaller samples are needed for Vp$p, PFR, etc, and it's a good slap in the face to a weak-tight player that thinks they're a TAG to see the hard numbers.

I think it's a good purchase, but a begginner may be able to get by with the free version for the first couple months, especially if they play low limits.

Also, PT is really useful for limit hold 'em, fairly useful for NLHE, and useless for omaha, stud, etc... I play all the games, and hold 'em is only about 25% of my play, so PT isn't my most valuable tool.

bottom line, i think PT is +EV for all players, but a recreational begginner player may be better off building bankroll first.

[JohnnyHumongous]

You are correct. Seeing people talk about using pokertracker at .5/1 to multitable is the most ludicrous thing I've ever seen. If you want to increase your skill, develop intuition, be a better player in the long run and dare I say have more fun along the way, ditch pokertracker until you can win at reasonable limits on your own.

I multitable 10-20 for big BB/100 and I still have never used PlayerView etc., and I only use PokerTracker so I can look up memorable hands quickly and track my BB/100 and profit for a given day, week or month.

[Pov]

I'll go ahead and answer pro-PT [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]. PokerTracker is essential for young player development in my opinion. Without PokerTracker it is just too easy to remember your wins, forget your losses and count your bonus whoring as wins. Spreadsheet or not. With enough discipline and record keeping you could keep track of these numbers on your own, but I imagine few players, particularly beginners actually do this. (The ones that do are probably the winners)

PokerTracker has on numerous occassions allowed me to correct significant leaks in my game. I agree that looking at minutia in your stats with small samples is rarely all that helpful, but that's not what I use PT for at all. One particularly fruitful excercise I recall was looking up medium suited connectors and discovering I seemed to be losing money with them. PT allowed me to find out why quickly and easily. It turned out I was playing them against smaller fields than I should have been (on average), mostly because I was limping in earlier positions than I should. I'm sure I was convincing myself at the time the table was loose and passive enough to do this, but the PT stats set me straight and made me realize I needed to up my standards. It made a big difference to my play. There are many such examples.

And if you're going to multi-table low limits it *does* help if you use it correctly and develop the proper intuitions. No, you should not base all your decisions on how this particular guy played his last 30 hands, but when a new player sits down and you know immediately he's a TAG or a fish despite not remembering him at all, that is huge. The ability to easily find tables with weak players and to easily determine whether a particular seat is a good one at a glance is of particular value to me and has paid for PT many times over. Following stats by rote I would not recommend.

If you only have $100 should you spend $55 of it on PT? No. I wouldn't go that far. But it would definitely be the first thing I purchased as a result fo bonus money. I think I would have developed much more quickly as a player if I had purchased it earlier. But only because I spend time actually *using* it and using it in a way that helps me to learn.

And finally, as another poster mentioned, you may not be able to determine your winrate accurately in 30K hands, but you can start to see a fairly accurate estimate of your VPIP, PFR, etc. within a few hundred hands and by the time you have a few thousand you know what your stats are. Knowing if these are in the "good" range is only half the battle, but if you're out of range, this will let you know which direction and where to start looking. Sure, you could have perfect stats and be playing all wrong, but that is a lot less likely. If your VPIP is 28 after 1000 hands, I can pretty much guarantee you need to make some significant changes while it may *feel* like you're playing tight. How else would a person like this know?

Maybe what we should really be doing is helping beginners get the most out of a tool like PokerTracker beyond just reading the base stats, but I think it's going to be a pretty key tool for the majority of players who want to learn quickly.

[alien freak boi]

i have PT but dont know how to use it yet... any good pt instructional web pages out there?

thx,
afb.

[Tailgunner]

[ QUOTE ]
I found I was making bad judgments based on the perceived tendencies of opponents based on stats from too small a sample set.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's like saying "I kept shearing off lug nuts because I set my torque wrench at 500 pounds, so now I only use a tire iron." If you use a tool improperly, it's going to do harm.

Poker Tracker isn't going to miraculously turn you from a loser into a winner, nor is the lack of it going to turn you from a winner to a loser. It's a tool.. no more, no less. Do we really have to add a caveat when suggesting to beginners that they should know what they're doing before they rely too heavily on it? I might if you were suggesting we issue rifles and live ammo to recruits on the first day of basic training, but they're not damaging my person or my business by screwing up. The only person they have the potential to hurt by mishandling PT is themselves.

Here's a tool that can help, it's your job to figure out how to use it correctly. I'm not going assume anything about your actual ability to do so.