What does it all mean?

With Pokerstars latest update yesterday all my AHK scripts stopped working. While I can still play 9 tables okay without hotkeys, I find it to be a bit like hard work. So until I get it sorted out I'm back at Full Tilt for a few days. I played in one of their $24 tourneys last night. I don't often play tourneys so was surprised to see that even when people have a sizable stack it was pretty much standard practice to jam it all in with top pair and a decent kicker. I used a couple of new strategies I learned from the "Full Tilt strategy guide" and managed to finish in the top 10, out of over 400 players for a nice little payout. I finally got all my money in before the flop with QQ but was called with AK and saw both an Ace and King come on the flop. More cash game action today and I still say that the low limit cash games are softer at Full Tilt than Pokerstars.

Today's Topic: Pokertracker Stats. What does it all mean?

A lot of people use pokertracker (if you don't, then you should), but very few players know what to look for when analyzing their Pokertracker stats. The first thing you should always do is at the end of each poker session you should use the Pokertracker replay hand history feature to look at the 10 hand you made and lost the most money on in that day. See what mistakes you made and if you had correct odds for making calls. Also check if there were any opportunities to have made more money off your winning hands. While there are many different styles and ways to make money playing poker, the following range of cash game figures is a good start to see if you are playing well.

• Voluntarily Put $ Into the Pot % (VP$IP%) This statistic is how often you put money into the pot when you have nothing in the pot so far. In general, you only want to be playing hands when they'll make you money in the long term. In general, a VP$IP% of 16-20% is considered reasonable, with 16% being incredibly tight, and over 24% being somewhat loose.
  
• Preflop Raise (PF Raise) Raising pre-flop gives you a few advantages. First, it gets opponents to fold. No matter what cards they fold, your odds of winning the hand increase. It may even force a better hand to fold. In general, raising between 9% and 13% of the time is reasonable. A percentage below that is usually to tight, and a percentage above that is too reckless.
  
• Aggression factor (Total AF) our aggression factor is calculated by (Raise % + Bet %) / (Call %), which means an aggression factor of 1.00 means you Raise or Bet as often as you Call. In general, an aggression level between 2.0 and 2.5 is considered quite aggressive. A low aggression factor means you are a passive player, and are probably not making the most out of every hand.
  
• Went to Showdown (Went to SD%) This figure reflects how often you played a hand past the river. This figure should sit between 25 -35%. If it is below 25% then you are probably folding winning hands too often. If it is above 35% then you may be paying off with too many losing hands.
  
• Big Bets per 100 (BB/100) This figure represents the amount of big bets that you have won (For NL holdem a big bet in Pokertracker is 2x the big blind, so for .5/$1 a BB is $2). A good player is expected to win between 2-5 BB/100, over a large number of hands (at least 20000)
  

For the above statistics to be most relevant you need to have a minimum of 10000 hands recorded in your Pokertracker database, and preferably over 20000 hands of data. If you are unsure where to find these figures in, or are having difficulty setting up Pokertracker then I would definitely recommend the "Pokertracker Guide" by Iggy.

Link of the Day:

This link is an Utube video for anyone interested in poker history. It is called "One of a kind" and follows the life of "Stu Ungar", who many consider to be the greatest poker player of all times. A sad story which chronicles the reality of gambling, not just the glamour. Link here.