How are you *estimating* that you're winning $15/hr? Do you have any records? How many hours are we talking about here? I get about 500hrs/year, but I play a couple of times a week.

There's nothing wrong with getting up when you've mentally locked up a win. Sure, it's not the *best* strategy, but it's better to just get up, talk a walk and/or go home rather than keep playing sub-optimally. Another strategy is to rack up, talk a walk, go to dinner, and sit back down an hour later with a single BI.


In most live games, you don't need a light 3! range. But that's a discussion for a strategy thread. (An interesting one ... make a new thread.)

My first recommendation is to download a tracking app to your phone and use it religiously. It is rare that a person is self aware enough to accurately estimate that numbers you've quoted over a 7 year time frame.

With that said, 7.5 BB per hour is respectable.

Won't get much into strategy discussion in this thread. Generally speaking, most of your profit at live low stakes comes from playing boring, straight forward value bet/fold. Advanced thinking is over thinking at 1/2.

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Alright excel gurus itt:

Im making a live hand history tracker. Yes its dumb / waste of time / meaningless sample.

My question is, looking at how a hand history is converted from pokerstars for example, how would you go about creating a matrix in excel that does something similar.

My normal shorthand looks something like this:

utgL, co $25,btn $75,utgf, coC. Flop K76ssd. CO x, BTN $80, f

Now, i am adapting it into a pre filled template.

If im tracking only my hands, how would you set this up in excel. So that each hand history reads formulaically / consistently

It might be easier if i snippet what i have so far but i dont want to corrupt ideas yet

Yeah, I'm having trouble getting past this as well. Especially when he then goes on to state he's probably winning 85% of his sessions (orly?); I mean, at this point I can only take his winrate estimate with a grain of salt.

I don't think there's anything wrong with playing a deepstack far differently than you would a shortstack, and mostly when you've "locked up a win" that's what you're sitting on. Does playing a lower variance / no-light-3betting style / non-imaginative deepstack game hinder your winrate? Possibly. I wouldn't beat yourself up about it. Playing to your strengths and avoiding your weaknesses is not a bad way to go about things, and from you impressive (yet unreliable) results it sounds like you're doing fine.

GgoodluckG

Avaritia ... how are you going to be recording these things at the table? In a text file? Google spreadsheet on your phone? (Do they have Excel for phones?).

I have a template on my phone.

It looks like this:

1
UTG
UTG2
UTG3
UTG4
HJ
CO
BTN
Sb
Bb

2
UTG
UTG2
UTG3
UTG4
HJ
CO
BTN
Sb
Bb

And goes to 100. I plan on logging 100 hands a session.

To carry out a hand history:

2
UTG ($600) $20/c
UTG2 f
UTG3 f
UTG4 ($1000) c/f
HJ f
CO f
BTN (H$900) $80
Sb f
Bb f

Flop: K67ssd UTG x, BTN $90, UTG f

So here H= hero c = call x = check f = fold. $amount = an open or a raise. So the $20/c means open $20 and called the btn raise.

This looks like alot but is surprisingly simple with the template. I need it like this bc i need an easy way of seeing stack sizes.

As for uploading to excel, it will be manual. I do nothing at work. The question is what will the matrix look like to capture that hand history. (Cant just be text. I want to KNOW what btns cbet % is after 1000 hands) so it needs to be a column or row.)

If you convert your hand history at exactly the same format as a pokerstars hand history file, you would then probably be able to import it to pokertracker.

That's fair. I have a pretty tight grip on the total amount won since I've kept it in my BR or bought memorable items. The hours estimation is more rough. Though the variance is high, I think I play about once a week for a ~5 hour session so that's ~250 hours/year or 1750 hours over 7 years
...
But I wasn't really looking to debate my results. I was more just wanting, "If you accept these results as true, what types of leaks would you expect this player is making." Basically what opportunities would you guess there are for me given that I'm winning the vast majority of my sessions but have an underwhelming win rate? 3! light, which I understand to be a good but high variance tactic is one thing that has come to my mind, but I was curious if there are other things you would expect a player like me to be (not) doing.

On your list of problems at 1/2, your light 3 bet percentage should be pretty low. Other than that, this isn't the place for this discussion and it's pretty impossible to to discuss without knowing your style of play/having established leaks etc.

Hmm, I'll think about the template. I usually do a lot of this kind of thing in Matlab personally. There should be a way to convert that data into a delimited file that Excel will read easily.

I 3bet light with any 2 cards as long as it is +EV to do so. I certainly would not wait until I have a blocker or position to do so. This will tend to work out better in weekday games consisting of more level 2 thinkers than weekend games filled with level 1 thinkers that will put 2/3rds of their stack in the middle with T9 because it's sooooted.

BTW, wrong thread for this.

Ava, I'm sure you could get a programmer to create a converter program for you so you don't have to convert manually.

Or better yet, have the programmer create the converter program so that it does this. Maybe not Pokerstars though since that's also used for Ignition hands. Convert to Ipoker or PartyPoker ect. instead.

My first couple thoughts on this... you could easily write a python script to take in a text file generated on your phone to build a CSV file that would be automatically imported by Excel.

The Excel/CSV result would be something like each hand is comprised of multiple rows as actions and columns are Player's hands (and their actions) and pots, etc...

Column headers:
Hand unique ID
Street
Action count
Community Cards
Pot (bb)
PX's Name
PX's Position
PX's hand
PX's Stack remaining
PX's action
PX's size (bb)
Pot (bb)

So a simple example of the resultant CSV, HU with Hero as SB:

458,Preflop,1,,1.5,Hero,SB,QsQc,99.5,Bet,3,4
458,Preflop,2,,4,Fish1,BB,??,99,Raise,15,19
458,Preflop,3,,19,Hero,SB,QsQc,97,Call,15,34
458,Flop,4,AsKsJs,34,Hero,SB,QsQc,85,Puke-Check,0,34
458,Flop,5,AsKsJs,34,Fish1,BB,??,85,Bet,30,64
458,Flop,6,AsKsJs,64,Hero,SB,QsQc,Fold,0,64

The key here is that each line of the CSV file is only one action with pointers to the previous and next action.

If your shorthand is regular in form, then you could easily have a python script that would build the CSV file for you. And then you can have a macro in Excel read the CSV file and dump it into a proper .xlsx file which then can do math and analysis.

Or, you could have a different form of file for the xlsx file and the CSV file would just be the raw data.

I prefer to keep data in CSV form as its trivial to use a program like Notepad++, Matlab or Octave to read the raw data.

Notepad++ can be used to search ASCII text for keywords very quickly in gargantuan files (I have GPS logs that are 10s of MB in length, unfortunately).

SO say you have a player, "JimmyTheNose", you can grep your CSV database very easily without having to use Excel to handle it.

Use repeating forms (e.g. structs) like:

PrePot (bb)
PX's Name
PX's Position
PX's hand
PX's Stack remaining
PX's action
PX's size (bb)
PostPot (bb)

To make automating the hand histories easier.

If I was going to write this up for analysis in Matlab each Hand would maybe be a struct...

You can always add a field that will take in notes for each action line.

So in your shorthand, perhaps you use /* and */ to enclose comments that go in the end of a line in your CSV.

E.g.

458,Flop,4,AsKsJs,34,Hero,SB,QsQc,85,Puke-Check,0,34,/*This Villain will always bet a made hand here*/

Voice of experience itt.

Honestly, there are too many inflection points to do this in excel on the fly. Each player in the hand increases dimensionality so n>3 is a nightmare.

But Lapi are smart so python scripts.

I definitely would not recommend trying to make a live poker hand history database.

Hello cashgamers. i play 60s spins and 30-100$ mtts online and have decent winrates at those, about 100% roi in mtts and 7bb/100 in spins. I've found a cashgame in my city, with no regs at all. Ive played there for a few hours and the game is full of LAG and LP players, those that 10x overbet shove flop OOP and not fold FDs to a shove getting 3:1 on the turn. The action is as fast as it gets live i guess.
I can get a loan ~15 buyins for that game, at 10% monthly interest.
The game runs every day and i could put in some 60 hours a month. I am staked online so it does not affect the online action. The min buyin is 50bbs and i people play very deep at times as i saw some 500-600bb stacks.

Do you think it is worth risking it as in RoR > 5%? Also what kind of winrate would you expect in an all-recs game with one online reg and what kind of swings? Basically i would need to win ~10bb per hour or so for it to be better than playing online.

You can't win what you don't put in the middle

But seriously if the games playing deep af and aggro af you should not be playing with 1500bb roll, esp if that money matters to you.

Thanks YGOchamp, do you think that a ~5k bb roll would be adequate or is that an overkill?

Not even close to overkill.

In an ideal world you want to always be covering the fish. So 300-500bb in that game would be a better representation of one buy in.

You also want to be over-rolled in an ideal world. Even with a standard ~20-30 buy ins to be "properly" rolled, its still going to be brutal when you drop 5-10 buy ins on a non-replishanable roll. To play your A-game you should be able to drop 10-20 buy ins without stressing much over it imo.

fwiw I think the game is still very profitable and you're able to play on your current role, but the correct strat would be to buy in like 100bb and play very very nitty until you have more wiggle room. Your WR obv isnt going to be nearly as high as if you were able to buy in for 500bb and make insane hero calls vs people spewing bcuz you can afford to lose -- but its a start