Using Poker Software to Plug Leaks in Your Game

One of the reasons people buy tracking software is to plug leaks in their own game, but I find that most players never get around to doing so. Most people buy Holdem Manager or PokerTracker, set up the HUD with a few stats, and away they go. They use their personal stats after sessions to find out how they are doing and the more sophisticated players will check their VPIP and W$SD percentages against whatever someone on TwoPlusTwo said they should be. As with most software, 90% of the features never get used; they are just there to sell the product.

With a product like Microsoft Word, which I am using to write this article, it’s fine for me to use only 10% of the program because the other 90% will not improve my writing very much (some would say nothing could improve my writing, which I pretend is a compliment). With poker software, the opposite is true. Most players get very little from the program; the part they do use is almost wasted without a better understanding of the more in-depth features.

In this article, I’ll be going over the basics to get you started analyzing your own stats and results. Future articles in the series will focus on specific games so that we can help you get every one of those leaks and plug them up tight. I’ll be using Holdem Manager for the examples in this article, but things work much the same way in PokerTracker 3 and it shouldn’t be tough to follow along. The focus of these articles will also be cash games, although a tournament piece may soon follow.

The first step is to open up Holdem Manager and click on the Cash Games tab at the top. This starts out with a default report that gives you an idea of how you are doing in various aspects of the game. At the top left of the window, you will see a drop-down menu labeled “Select Report Name from List.” Click on the drop-down menu and select “Plugging Leaks 01 – Overall,” which will bring up a report with all of the stats we need for this exercise.

First, check the Hands column, which should be at the far left in the report. You’ll need at least 10,000 hands for most of these stats to be accurate. As your sample size increases, you will get more accuracy and be able to do more detailed analyses. With 10,000 hands, you can get a very accurate idea of your pre-flop stats as well as things like W$SD and Aggression Factor. However, your win rate and positional stats might not be useful yet. We’ll talk about those in the next article.

Take a look at your BB/100, which is the third column in the report. Different games have different win rates, but here is a list of what a very good player can make. Don’t worry if you are way below these numbers; most players are and that’s why you’re here trying to find ways to improve:

$25NL and Below – 8 BB/100
$50NL to $200NL – 5 BB/100
$400NL and Above – 3 BB/100

Fixed Limit $1/$2 and Lower – 2 BB/100
Fixed Limit $2/$4 and $3/$6 – 1.5 BB/100
Fixed Limit $5/$10 and Above – 1 BB/100

This should give you a basic idea how you compare to the best players at your level and how much improvement you could make in your income.

Let’s start with the most basic statistic, VPIP, or Voluntarily Put Money into the Pot. There are two ways to approach checking your statistics. The first way is to find experts who have posted their stats or recommended stats in articles and forum posts. For nine-handed No Limit games, a quick search on a few forums will tell you that your VPIP should be somewhere around 5% in early position and 20% on the button. Different players' stats vary significantly, but if you are more than twice as loose or twice as tight as these numbers, you are way off and need to hit the books.

The second way to approach this is to use the player list in your tracking software. In PokerTracker 3, it is in the Summary tab; just click on the column you want to sort by. You can also click on the wrench in the upper right-hand corner of the report and filter to include only players who you have a large number of hands on so that your statistics are reliable. In Holdem Manager, you can click on the Players tab and then on the column to sort. Setting the minimum number of hands and customizing the report can all be done on the left-hand side of the page.

Once you have the list of players and have filtered the report so that you have only people with a large sample size, take a look at the biggest winners and see how their stats compare to each other and your own. You may find that most of the big winners have a higher W$SD and a lower VPIP than you, meaning you should be tighter and more willing to get away from a hand. You might instead find that the winners are playing looser than you are and have higher levels of aggression, so you can adjust your game slightly that way. Remember that unless you have a very large sample size on your opponents, the winners' Won Show Down stat may be higher than it would usually be because you are looking at the top of the winners' list and these are probably the good players who also had some luck on their side.

I advise most of my students to buy a large sample of hands from HHDealer (my favorite) or one of the other hand history resellers and use it to check their own stats. It provides you with a large sample size right away and that makes finding a correct range of stats much easier.

Using these techniques, you should be able to get a good idea what the correct stat ranges are for the games you're playing. This information can also help when you are color-coding stat ranges in the HUD, setting up auto-rate rules, trying to figure out a particular opponent, or confirming suspicions about your own game.

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