Categorized play errors

Preflop you have 3 choices. In order of preference, Bet (or raise/reraise)/Fold/Call. Check also in the BB. Post flop you may also get the option of checking.

I’d like to categorize my errors/misplays, structured by what I did instead of what I should have done, and then when this misplay tends to happen for me.

Preflop:

• Call; should Fold
  • getting pot odds in the SB (gotta consider playablity of the hand)
  • calling behind limpers (not sure if I do this inappropriately or not)
• Call; should Raise
  • raising hand in late position
    • but not if they are limp/callers
    • maybe suited connectors/pairs are better for raising against limp/callers?
  • With better than average hand in a blind battle
    • Ed Miller says raise crap hands, especially when limped to in the blinds because they have no flop value
• Folding; should Raise
  • when against weak limpers who will fold
    
• Raise; should Fold
  • rare, I think. Possibly blind steal against loose or aggressive blinds

PostFlop:

• Call; should Fold/Raise
  • weak bet at flop w/no strong draws for me
  • weak draw, stabby or weak opponent
• Check Flop; should Bet
  • positional stab at pot that no one is interested in, especially with flush draw (too obvious to get money later) or gut shot or underpair (unlikely to hit)
  • decent draw OOP; acts as blocking bet or could win immediately
• Check Turn; should Bet
  • Trying to keep pot small with a marginal hand, but playing against aggressive or non-thinking players
  • Forget to bet when a flush/straight draw on table
    • even if not drawy board, may have 2 pair draw
• Bet/Bet; should Bet/Fold
  • stabbing at middle/bottom pair; should fold if unimproved
• Bet or Raise; should Fold
  • marginal hand when the opponent is not weak/tight
  • low stacks
  • against calling station and without good hand
  • against an aggressive player who will challenge/reraise
• Check raised
  • I think this is only good for pot building against most of my opponents

Obviously these patterns are geared towards the level of players that I usually play against these days, but it can carry on. For example, in the forum tournaments I made a few weak plays in some of these categories, like limping an otherwise raiseable hand behind a limp or throwing away a raiseable late position hand.

I think overall the errors tend to be calling errors where I’ll call preflop or flop/turn bets when instead I should be mostly folding and sometimes raising. (Seems funny to say that. That’s exactly a Dan Harrington statment, one that I understand, but one that makes so much sense to actually write in this situation) Less frequently the error will be over aggression and I’ll bet/shove against calling stations or when I’m behind and I don’t believe that my opponent has something, but these result in more spectacular crash and burns. The calling errors result in more frequent but smaller chip leaks, as well as more difficult decisions later.

Don’t like losing

I’m realizing how much I don’t like to lose. Back to the Islewars entry, I liked playing at a level where I won 60% of the time. Win too often and it’s no challenge and boring. Win too infrequently and it can be frustrating and pointless. That’s an oversimplification of course, especially if used too generally. Ask a college football player and they’d love to play for the Patriots, but most would also be happy playing for San Francisco, just to be playing. And of course it can be good to challenge oneself and play harder levels where you win less often, just to develop your skills. As a poker player though, you have to manage your bankroll. An athlete can try to always play with players who are better than themselves, but a poker player will go broke trying to do this all the time.

Right now I’m having most of my poker fun playing my $1 Turbo SnG project. 24 of 40 done, ITM 17 times; a 71% win rate. Cost including rake of $30.00, profit so far $22.20. In other words for every $1.25 it costs to play, I average 0.95 profit.

It will be interesting to compare to the Bet/Raise/Fold exercise when it’s all done. The differences will be 1) real money verses play money, 2) no restriction of actions, 3) turbo verses regular, and 4) site. So far the most interesting aspect is that I’ve already ITMed 17 times in 24, whereas the earlier experiment I only ITMed 20 out of 39 times so I’m actually finishing in the money more often I did with the play money experiment.

Having said that, I wonder how many beginners would read that and think, hey, I’m a winning player at play money. This means that I can win even more with real money!

In my opinion this is not a correct conclusion to draw because the first 3 differences are big. “2) restriction of actions” in particular meant that I was playing handcuffed in the Bet/raise/fold experiment. I have poker skills beyond what I was using in the play money project, and I am allowed to use them in my current project. A play money player who can match my play money results won’t get the same results that I’m getting in the $1 project. If you read this and plan to try anyways, please leave me a comment and let me know.

I’m somewhat curious as to the degree that turbo/non-turbo is a factor as well, but I don’t have the time/patience to play a regular length SnGs these days. I’m pretty sure that the pressure of the turbo blinds causes problems. People probably panic after a few orbits if they’re down a bit, and I’m pretty sure some of the weak, weak play I’ve seen when the blinds go up is due to lack of understanding. Last game SB limped AJ into my BB when the table was 4-5 handed and the blinds were high. Later HU he did the same thing. Mind you, he’s -$128 after 101 games.

$25NL Style statistics results

I datamined for a while today at one of the sites that I play at. Basically opened up a bunch of $25NL tables and let PT collect data. Collected close to 7,000 hands of history. I removed players who had less than 5 orbits (44 hands or less) although I suppose though you can’t say that you have a read on their style in less hands, they still could represent data that is relevant to the overall results. I may try adding them back in later and compare if there are some “hit and run” winners or losers, although I suspect if anything these would be mostly shorties who leave after stacking once.

First, I looked for 1/3 splits of VP$IP and PFR, which turned out to be

>25 Loose, > 15 Average, lower is Tight, and,

> 8 Aggressive, >4 Average, lower is Weak.

I think this is to be expected pretty much. The tables are too loose and weak because they are micro tables. Even when I’m intentionally playing slightly loose and slightly weak to adjust to the tables I’m at 17/6, so on the tight edge of average and right in the middle of PFR.

Next area of interest; who is winning? Well,

• Tight are 1.3 BB/100
• Average are -2.0
• Loose -2.9

so tight players generally are winning.

• Aggresive are -2.2
• Average -.3
• Weak -1.0.

Seems odd that all players in terms of PFR are somewhat negative, but, somewhere buried in the win/loss is the rake, and I haven’t adjusted for that at all and I think that is what is showing up here.

Further breakdown shows

• Ave/Weak: 1.4; 35 players,
• Ave/Ave: -2.1; 48
• Ave/Aggr: -4.3; 45

• Loose/Weak: 1.3; 28
• Loose/Ave : -3.5; 27
• Loose/Aggr : 1.3; 71

• Tight/Weak : 5.4; 39
• Tight/Ave : 2.6; 57
• Tight/Aggr : -9.0; 23

So while the tight players overall are winning, it’s the aggressive ones that are losing, and a lot! Unfortunately, that’s the category that I naturally want to play. Playing tight is good, but apparently the less PFR you do, the better. PFR only works if you’re LAG.

One more thing to add from this preliminary analysis; PFR is evenly distributed amongst the Ave VP$IP players, but 3/5 of the Loose players are also Aggr (since they’re playing so many I guess they raise more; I don’t know how many are minraises) while almost 1/2 of the Tight players are in the Ave PFR group.

Some sensitivity analysis; if I move Aggr down to 6%, there are 51 TAgs and they still lose 3.6 BB/100. If I move Aggr up to 9% there are only 9 who lose 28.6

Should I be happy that I’m ahead of the average win rate for almost every group? It’s a little sad to think that I should be acutally raising less often preflop, but maybe I should at least consider throwing away more hands yet and limp less from late behind limpers and in the SB.

One thing to gloat or not about, is that as I suspected a tight aggressive style is too dangerous at micro levels. You don’t get enough fold equity preflop and later because there are too many weak limp/caller/chasers who won’t fold. Value bet, but don’t bother with more than one barrel or too many bluffs.

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I’m separating this because now this is another way of using the data.

The tightest players are amazingly tight. There are 8 rocks out of 373 who have VP$IP of less than 5% (and remember; all have more than 44 hands), 4 more less than 6%, 3 more less than 7%, 4 more less than 8%, and then at 8% it starts increasing, so 5% of the players have VP$IP of less than 8%. Now, none of these can be labeled Aggr by my original definition because if they only play less than 8% obviously they can’t raise more than 8%, but pretty much across the board these players PFR is 50% of their VP$IP or better, so they know to raise these monsters that they are waiting for. But they’re mostly losing. One played 514 hands at 5.6/4.4 and won 0.5 BB/100. Three others with over 200 hands were 11.3, -1.8 and – 12.5.

I’m not sure if I can guess the multitablers. I have many with multiple sessions recorded which could mean that they were on more than one of the tables that I had open, but on the other hand I suspect that if they sat out, then back in, PT may have recorded this as a separate session. On the other hand, since I only ran the experiment for 8 hours or so, these players with 15,13, 11 hours must have been multitabling. One TAG with 1,114 hands, 15.1 hours over 7(?) sessions ran 14.8/8.7 and +12.9 BB/100. Perhaps he’s someone to check out more closely.

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If I look at PFR as a % of VP$IP for the Tight players, more than 1/2 have a % greater than 50%, but they are losing at -4.8.

Picking out some winning and losing TAGs, all complete from the SB less than I do, though the losing ones seem to do slightly more. Very few differences though, except, PFR w/no showdown, winners much higher than losers, PFR went to showdown, losers much higher than winners, PFR won showdown, winners much higher than losers.

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If I find players near my style; VP$IP between 8 and 20, PFR% between 30 and 60 of their VP$IP and look for differences between winners and losers,

• VP$IP: 14.6 losers/14.5 winners,
• PFR: 6.7/6.8
• W$atSD: 31/32
• Fr SB: 28/24
• Fold SB: 70/68
• Fold BB: 67/61
• W$ saw flop: 31.1/42.4
• Went to SD: 22.8/20.6
• C-bet: 49.2/64.4
• PFR fold: 14.1/4.4
• Flop bet: 19/22
• Flop call: 7/10
• Flop fold: 28.7/24.4
• Flop Aggr: 2.8/3.0
• Turn bet: 23.5/25.7
• Turn call: 8.9/10.5
• Turn fold: 22.1/20.3
• Turn Aggr: 1.6/1.6
• River bet: 16.9/28.3
• River call: 10.3/6.8
• River Aggr: 0.5/0.6
• PFR, no SD: 62.3/69.1
• PFR, went to SD: 14.8/15.4
• PFR, won SD: 18.2/48.6

Maybe all this means is that the winners caught better hands? They won more often at SD, c-bet more often, won without SD slightly more often, but even won at SD more often after PFR. Interesting, 2/3 of these players are winning though, and on average are winning 4.4 BB/100.

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If I compare some of these to my stats, my VP$IP fr SB is way higher, my Won $ when saw flop is the same as the losers, not the winners, Went to SD is slightly higher than the losers, Won at SD is always close to 50, my bet/raise after PFR is higher than both, PFR fold is close to the winners, I bet slightly more often, call slightly less on the flop so my flop aggression is higher, but my turn bet/raise rates are almost half either of these players (!, my attempts to control pot size, I think. Probably a misplaced thought process at this level), and all my flop, turn and river folds are about 1% higher than both.

My buddy who wins with 1,114 hands has a VP%IP fr SB of 14%, saw a flop all hands of 12% vrs my 19, but we won when we saw a flop of both 31%, but he’s only c-betting 45%(!), folding 14% after PFR as opposed to me folding 6% after PFR. Flop/turn/river aggression of 3.1/6.3/0.0 as opposed to my 4.2/1.1/1.5. It sounds like he’s more willing to let his hands go on the flop even after PFR, but value bets and increases the pressure on later streets, though his W$ at SD is only 43%. He’s got a nice 13BB/100 win rate though, so he’s getting value when he does win. Possibly some of the losses may be short stack flop shoves; who knows.