Knowledge is power

So, I realise that I didn't post yesterday, but after yesterday's single session I was pretty pissed off about the way the results were going, and I really started to think I might have developed a major leak, instead of just running bad. Despite checking through the games I had played I couldn't find anything obvious, but that didn't mean it wasn't there. So I decided I needed more information. I knew that it was time to bite the bullet, and get some proper software to analyse my game in detail. So, having wasted my trial of HEM a few months ago when I had a strop because it didn't work immediately, and instead of wasting time continuing to whinge on a blog about how awful my life is (which it isn't) and how bad I run at the tables (which is in truth merely an unconfirmed rumour), I downloaded the trial of PT3 instead, and spent the whole night getting my archive of all my hand histories in order and then manually importing the $5 DoN games into the PostgreSQL database. I knew there was a reason I had kept them all, and this was it! I think I finally crawled into bed around 8am.

So, I'm now the proud owner of over 100,000 hands all neatly loaded up in and ready to filter in a zillion different ways.

The first thing I realised is just how many different opponents there are out there, and how small is the number of people I see on a regular basis. I think that out of just over 2,500 games, the most I've seen the same opponent is about 60 games. I've seen >13,000 different SNs at the tables in that time, and the huge majority of them have only been seen on a single occasion. And there are only maybe two or three dozen who I have sat with in more than 20 games.

This means that there is, and will continue to be, very little time to accurately profile most villains and assign them some ranges, so I will have to refine and improve the default ranges I use for randoms and improve the way in which I use them for my equity calculations.

The second thing I realised is how chips flow into and out of my stack during a typical game. On average, I only win chips in the first two levels (BB2o and BB30), while I slowly lose them through the rest of the game. In fact, in all games (which obviously includes losses where my cumulative chip count is -1,500) I tend to lose chips at a rate of about 6 chips per hand throughout the game. Comparison with some of the other guys in the DoN group shows that this seems to be a typical profile for a winning reg. So that's an encouraging start!

It puts into numbers for me what I've read on 2+2 about how chips flow away from 'safe' stacks once the game becomes push/fold. And I love numbers. People can twist words, and use them to misrepresent something, but once you look carefully you simply can't argue with numbers. They are a fact.

Of course, no real game will ever look anything like these averages, but it gives an good insight into how the table dynamics develop. The important thing is that poker is not about one hand, or one game. It's about the long term, and making good decisions thousands and thousands of times so that eventually you reap the benefits of correct play.

The corollary is that if good players are slowly losing chips through the tournament then the players who are on average winning them must be bad players. After all, there are always 15,000 chips on the table, someone has to own them and it isn't the good players. It sounds idiotic to think that way, but remember; to win chips you have to risk chips, and risking chips is not ideal in a DoN game, which is basically an exercise in survival. So the guys who have the most chips must have risked the most chips and are therefore bad.

Suddenly the whole 'donk big stack' thing on the bubble makes much more sense now. Of course. These are the morons from whom we win our chips in the early levels. Usually they bust out spectacularly with garbage hands, but occasionally those garbage hands win, and they survive. They continue to win chips in the later stages of the game because they continue to risk them. But most of the time they don't last long enough. It's these occasional tastes of victory which keep the fish coming back.

Even as I write this post I am understanding some things which I knew intellectually to be true, because better players than myself had told me, but I didn't 'get' why they were true. Now I 'get' it. There is still a long way to go; the things I have discovered today only begin to scratch the surface, but I hope that I will be able to learn to use this vast information resource to improve my game further. My regret is that I didn't do this a long time ago.

I think the next step will be getting familiar with using the information from the HUD, which is integral to PT3, to better profile villains when I am considering shoves or calls. I am looking forward to that, because with 20 tables open it can become a little tricky to keep track of who is who.

Thanks to all in the group today who input useful stuff as I was familiarising myself with PT3: Alex, Bryan, Chris, Wurly, Kevin.

I'll probably switch to HEM anyway in the near future, as everyone rates it above PT3, but wanted to trial something like it just to see what I'd get, and I'm definitely impressed.

I also had a few games today (it's still Sunday until I go to bed), so I'll do a quick recap. First, the good news, I was slightly profitable in each of three little sessions, to a total of about $30. This covers some of the losses of the last few days, but not all. Because yesterday I was down $11, and Thursday down $52, which still leaves me in the red for February. I have also only played about half of the games I should have played for my monthly goals. As real life this coming week is gong to be a bit busy I will really need to use every minute I can for game time just to stand still, then catch up the shortfall next week to stay on target for my February goal. Also today I broke through 1,000 games for the year.



Games 1,017
Wins 557
ITM 54.8%
Profit $282
ROI 5.3%


Finally, congrats to the Saints on their win in the SuperBowl earlier today; I know that a couple of the guys were pretty happy about that. I won't profess to understand the game, but as long as people have fun that's gotta be a good thing.