Improving Your Game with Poker Software

Preparing to play a new game or level isn't like it used to be. This isn't 2003. I know it's only six years later, but that is an absolute eternity in the world of online poker. A few years ago, I would watch a game for a few hours, take a few notes, and start playing a table or two until I got used to it. When I moved up from $5/$10 to $10/$20 Fixed Limit Hold’em games in 2004, that is exactly the process I went through. The games weren't all that different from the previous level and they certainly weren't as tough as they are these days, so the transition went fairly smoothly.

Now that the games are tougher, just jumping up a level without any stats on your opponents or any useful information on the game is a rough way to get started. Since it's possible to buy hands from hand history resellers and have stats on your opponents when you get to the game, some players are taking that route. On many sites, it is against the rules to use these hand histories while you play. Full Tilt Poker has even tried to tell its players that they can't visit these sites whether they are playing on the online poker room or not, so make sure you check into what is allowed on the rooms where you play.

Working with a student who was making the same jump from $5/$10 to $10/$20 that I made years ago, I was struck by how different it was to prepare him. How to move up in levels and make more money are probably the most common questions I receive from students, so I thought that outlining the process we went through would be a help to some of our readers.

Since this player can't get rakeback on many of the major sites because he already has accounts, he has been playing on PokerStars for the last few months. At least he can get VIP rewards, although they won't compare to the kind of money he would make from rakeback.

We started by creating a new database in Holdem Manager and buying four million hands from HH Dealer. The research took about three minutes and we were able to determine not only that HHDealer was the only place to get a large quantity of hands for the kind of research we were doing, but also it was cheap.

As an aside, we created a new database because if we mixed these purchased hands in with a database that he used while he was playing, he would have been breaking the rules. There would be no way for PokerStars to catch him doing this, but the rules are the rules and I never encourage anyone to break them. To the best of my knowledge, it is not against the rules to use the hand histories for research and even if it were, I won't have any poker room telling me what I can do when I'm not on their site.

So why did we get these hand histories if we weren't going to use them while he played? We wanted to prepare for the game by finding out what the winners and losers are doing and who the serious grinders are. This is all valuable information. It took about four hours to get the hand histories loaded into his software, so once I helped him figure out all of the things he needed to do to get prepared, we scheduled a lesson for another day.

I also gave him all of the information I have put together on Six-Max Fixed Limit games. By the end of the lesson, he had a set of links to read, stats and charts, a good Heads-Up Display (HUD) layout for Holdem Manager, and whatever else I had in my Six-Max Fixed Limit Hold’em folder.

A few days later, we were able to sort through millions of hand histories to see what we could learn from them. My first choice is always to take note of stat averages. In this case, we found that the average VPIP was 34.7 and the average PFR was 16.7. While we didn't know for sure what stats we were going to shoot for, this is certainly too passive pre-flop, so we had already identified a weakness in the game that can be exploited. Looking at the blind defense numbers later explained most of this discrepancy because we found that most players were defending their blinds frequently with calls instead of raises. In a six-max game, you are playing in the blinds 33% of the time, so when people are defending their blinds passively, it increases their VPIP numbers and decreases their aggression factor pre-flop.

Using similar reports and filtering out the players with a small sample, we were able to find out what the average stats were and how the typical table tends to play. With at least 20 tables of $5/$10 six-max running at any time, leaving a table for a better one is not a problem because a new one will be available soon.

Our next step was to find out what stats separated the serious winners from the rest of the pack. Merely trying to emulate the stats of the winners won't make you a winner in a game this tough, but it certainly helps to understand what the winners are doing. To accomplish this, we ran a report in Holdem Manager that filtered out any players with less than 10,000 hands and only counted pots where there were five or six players seated at the table. Then, we sorted the results by BB/100 and took a look at what the best players were doing. Then, we compared the $5/$10 winners’ stats to the 70,000 hands that the student had from his $3/$6 play over the past few months.

This process takes an hour or two, but comparing all of his stats helped us find a few places where there was cause for concern. A good example of a place where we found a leak that we were able to plug was in his continuation bet percentages on the flop. In our large sample, we were saw that the serious winners were making continuation bets at least 85% of the time on the flop and many of them were making continuation bets over 90% of the time. When we took at a look at the student's numbers and found that he was only making continuation bets about 75% of the time, it was an easy adjustment for him. Looking through some of his hand histories, we were able to find situations where he should be making profitable continuation bets.

You should be able to find these differences on your own without a tremendous amount of work. It's faster to hire a coach and if you are really serious about improving quickly and playing for a living, it might be a good idea, but for most players, it will be enough to do this legwork yourself.

This has been a quick look at how you can use poker software to prepare for moving up a level and find places where you can plug leaks in your game. I was only able to touch on a few of the things we did here, but it's well worth spending a day on it if it can help you increase your win rate significantly. If we were able to increase my student's win rate by 10% from 1 BB/100 to 1.1 BB/100, then we have made him enough money to make a day's work well worth the time. Playing four tables of $5/$10 six-max, we can expect him to see about 400 hands per hour, so he'll be making an extra 0.40 big bets per hour. For a $4 per hour raise that lasts for the rest of your poker career, a day or two of research is a no-brainer.