Hi all,

A bit about me: I’m 27 (old ******* in the poker community), from the UK, I’ve got a degree in maths and statistics and work for the government. I’m by no means a poker genius but i’d like to think I know my maths/stats and i’ve been beating micro / small stakes cash games for almost 10 years so hopefully this isn’t all utter bollox :-)

CLIFFS

Villains are rarely completely unknown, there’s so much information available to us when we play and we need to make use of as much of it as possible or we’ll be losing a ton a value.

Fish don’t always stick around for long so we often need to make assumptions about them early before somebody else relieves them of their $.

Contrary to popular belief (i think) HUD stats can be used even if we have a very small sample, I only recommend making fairly small adjustments based on small samples however unless we have some additional evidence such as a poorly played showdown hand or a weird stack size.

Don’t gimmie none of this ‘villain is unknown’ BS. TL;DR

All this stuff will obvious to some of you but i see so many threads where people say stuff like the “only 20 hands on villain so he’s unknown” that i thought i’d try and write a post about making the most of the information we have about our opponents.

With limited information we’re going to have to make some assumptions, and we’re not always going to be right, but like with most things in poker we just need to make the best decision we can based on the partial information available to us.

Fish don’t stick always around for long so if we’re waiting for a 100 hand sample before we make any adjustments against them they’ll probably have already donated their cash elsewhere.

So here are some of the assumptions i make:

Things we know without even seeing a hand

Stack size

So a new player sits at the table, here’s what i assume about them given their buy in amount:

100bbs - Not much, however do consider that if you’re a reg in these games and you’ve never seen them before they’re slightly more likely to be a recreational player (more to follow)

41bbs-99bbs - Almost always a recreational player. Most good players will buy in full to maximise their winnings, pro shortstakers will buy in for the min.

40bbs - Either a recreational player or a pro shortstacker. More likely to be a recreational player nowadays, there are far fewer pro shortstackers about now 40-50bbs is the min buy-in.

Have we seen them before?

If we’re a reg in a certain game and have racked up a ton of hands and a player shows up that we’ve never played before there’s few possibilities:

1) They’re a recreational / new player
2) They’re decent and have either moved stakes, game type or sites

Looking at the players in my database i think it’s decent to assume that unknowns are more likely to be recreational players than players we’ve played with before. So simply by virtue of them being unknown i’ll give them slightly less credit than a known reg.

*This will only hold if you’ve played a lot of hands at your current stake, also I don’t know if this will work as well for micros stakes where the player pool is much larger and we’re less likely to come across other players.

Screen name / Nationality reads

Only if you’re pretty ****ing desperate but here goes:

Regish names: 2+2isms, anything maths related, random assortment of letters and numbers

Nationality - players from the same country sometimes tend towards a certain playing style, often probably driven certain strategy websites available to them or perhaps the playing style of popular players from that country (or whatever stereotypes you've come across)

But like I say these are really last resort if i've got a 50/50 decision and have literally nothing else to go on.

Things we could potentially figure out from just 1 hand

Did they post the blinds rather than waiting

They’re definitely not a nit. Most of the time they’ll be a fish sometimes an aggro and/or impatient reg.

Have we seen them do anything non-standard

Did they open limp?
Did they use any non-standard bet sizing?
Did they take a weird line?
etc.....

Any stuff like this and i'm instantly giving them less credit for being a good player, until they prove me otherwise

Showdowns

Once we’ve seen a villain showdown a hand they’re definitely not unknown anymore.

The way they played the hand can give us tons of info that wouldn’t be obvious from their stats until we’ve played 100's of hands with them.

e.g. They opened A7o from UTG, now we know they’re loose.
They played passively with a strong hand - nitty post flop
They stacked off on a dry board with just an overpair - usually a station
They set mined without the correct odds - bad player

This is why it’s important to take good notes, especially after we’ve seen a showdown.

Here’s a good post from Zumby on taking notes

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/32...l-drs-1188269/

For you zoomers/multi tablers out there, i’d strongly recommend notecaddy or the inbuilt note tracker in PT4 so you still get some of this info without having to see the showdowns or taking the time to write a note.

HUD stats

Let me start by saying i’m a big advocate of HUDs, even at micro stakes. It’s true we can just use some of the methods i’ve mentioned already to a get reads on people and still manage to beat the games for a decent clip. But for me, even the best note taker on the planet isn’t even going to get close to the information collected by a HUD (especially one with note tracker).

Anyway, I often see people making the mistake of assuming that we can’t use HUD stats until we’ve got a large sample on a villain.

In my opinion, not making use of HUD stats to categorise players, even with samples less than 10 is a big mistake.

Let's consider a villain who has raised pre-flop 3 out of 7 times, in the next hand he raises pre-flop again. What can we safely assume about this villain?

Well we certainly don’t have enough data to estimate exactly what his true PFR will be. The graph below shows a 90% confidence interval for this player and you’ll see his true PRF% could plausibly be anywhere between 20% and 90% (or even wider if you consider population tendencies, more on this below)



But just because we can’t peg villain on an exact range doesn’t mean we can’t use the information we’ve got to categorise him and adjust accordingly. Here’s a graph that estimates the probability of achieving this sample given different PFRs.



Here’s the process of informal weighting i go through in my head when playing:

Is he a nit? - Very unlikely (You’ll see from the graph that this sample is very unlikely to have come from a nit)

Is he a TAG? - slightly more likely but still unlikely (occasionally a TAG running hot will achieve this sample)

Is he a LAG? - more plausible

Is he a donkey / fish - most likely scenario

One more example to show the other side of the coin: Villain is 0/0 over 9 hands and he comes in for a raise

[IMG]

Now we see the most likely scenario is that this player is a nit or a TAG, it could be a card dead LAG and is very unlikely to be a massive spewy donkey.

I’ll use this informal weighting in my decision making hands. A word of warning though, be careful not to over-adjust based on just this information alone. I’m advocating fairly small adjustments to our play based on these bits of evidence. It will usually take a larger sample or several bits of evidence before i start making radical adjustments to my play.

Although it’s not practical to figure this stuff out in-game i’d say it’s worth playing around with these sorts of calculations until you get an intuitive feel for them and how they vary for different sample sizes so you can estimate them yourself in game.

Here’s a thread if you’re interested that takes it a step further and includes the tendencies of the population of players to adjust these probabilities.
http://archives1.twoplustwo.com/show...fpart=all&vc=1

Summary

Hopefully i’ve managed to convince you all that there’s tons of information available to us about our opponents when we play, sometimes even if we’ve only played a few hands with them.

I hope at least a few people find this interesting! feel free to add any comments or questions and i’ll be happy to try and field them.

Good luck at the tables

Great post mate, really worth the read especially the detailed maths which was a big help for me as I'm a bit lazy when it comes to Maths!

Little tangent here surronding Notetracker. How do I get it to make notes for all of my hands I have already played and where can I then access these notes? I don't quite get how to use it atm.

Very good and important point.

Thank you, I have always felt that if you see someone raise 6 times of 9 or whatever that it's reasonable to assume that they are likely (but not certainly) an overly aggressive fish and it's nice to see the math validating this. And yes the reaction you often enounter is 'LOL, less than 10 hands means nothing!'.

If you run a HUD showing your stats for the current session you can see how VPIP/PFR take some time to emerge. So I ran 13/10 at FR and could show up at say 7/3 or 18/16 after 50 hands. But I only once recall coming in at 70/50 over 10 hands.

Thanks for the feedback guys, i've never really wrote more than a couple of paragraphs in my previous 999 posts so i'm glad it makes sense!

I can only speak for PT4 but it creates the notes automatically, then there's a little box on my HUD and they show up when you hover over it

very good post! gl

Excellent post

Just a couple of things to add...

You mentioned looking out for non-standard bet-sizing and weird lines. But you can also spot a thinking player in one hand by their standard bet-sizing and playing a line that shows their knowledge (ie, you can see what they're trying to do with each action). When you look at the sequence of actions in a hand, it can be unlikely such expert play would arise by chance from a fish.

And of course you can also know someone is capable of something (eg, 3betting light) by seeing them do it just once. This can tell you a ton of info about a player, even without reliable frequency stats.

Insta-Sticky imo.

Good stuff.

Great post, thought I'd just reinforce point 2 as I've seen this a lot, maybe more than some people expect.

I can remember a player appearing in NL50 games quite some time ago. Playing extremely loose and aggro. Regs were falling all over themselves trying to isolate him and playing pots.

Turns out he was a winning 400nl player who had moved down significantly. Found out later he'd blown most of his BR taking shots at HU 1000nl against beastsw and was in a rebuilding phase grinding small stakes. Quite a few decent regs had to move down after he was done destroying them.

Also beware drunk players who are winners at higher stakes and have the discipline to move down to stuff about while having a few beers.

Great post. Love it.

Just on thing to say, and I'm nit picking, just because someone doesn't snap reload when they fall to 99bb doesn't make them bad. I don't snap reload because I know that regs know that regs do this. I do reload but subtlely even though I'm. Theoretically sacrificing the ability to be fully loaded all the time.

Of course to rebutt my own post, my other reg tag traits should override one inconsistency.

+1

Its a fairly reliable "tell" that someone who auto-reloads after folding BB and SB is a reg. Fish and recreational players probably don't even know the option is there, and if they do they'd probably set it to reload when below 50%.

Setting it to always reload when below 100% is announcing to the whole table that you might know what you are doing before you even get to the button or play a hand. Set it to 80 or 90% and you'll be a little less conspicuous.

yeah totally agree, i got a bit carried away with spotting fish, same logic applies for spotting good players as well

Regarding the auto-reload thing - I agree a 90-99bb stack could be a reg, but i still think it's more likely to be a recreational player.

Just one piece of the puzzle though as Ozi said

Good point, looking at your own stats at the start of each session is a great way to try and get a feel for how stats converge to their true values over different sample sizes

FWIW, I completely agree that you only need 10 hands to have an idea of the type of player. If you're playing full ring and sit out for one orbit before paying your blinds, you should be able to spot the loosest and tightest players pretty easily. ("If you can't spot the sucker in 10 mins....")
It's not uncommon to have someone at 0/0 after 10 hands. He might actually be a card-dead TAG, but you know for sure he's not a LAG/maniac. I've usually colour-coded everyone at my table within 2 orbits. While sitting out, I'll also observe a couple of hands going to showdown and make notes too. I can't emphasise enough how important it is to use stats and notes. Table and seat selection can increase your winrate significantly, even at 2NL.

I wouldn't say DEFINITELY not a lag, but very likely not a maniac as maniacs will get bored and play hands; good lags still know to fold bad hands.

beating micro / small stakes cash games for almost 10 years
it's time to move up. =P~ was still playing runescape 10 years ago.

ontopic* cool post~ Worst part of it is. . . :
Strange prologues to all the threads 'Line check 2-50nl vs [insert generic stereotype of player]"
" OMG I GOT THESE STATS+ 500 hands on villain what I do with it???"
" ZoMFG I've seen 100 hands played with this villain is he bluffing???"
" stats 14/11 1.4k hands. no specific reads"

lol

autopiloting multitablers

nice poast

Great post mate. Love these kind of posts as a gentle reminder to keep my brain switched on to everything going on at the table.

Wouldn't have put Ozi down for a 'stealth reg' either ;-)

i'll admit to being drunk and only reading the title, but if you play Zoom you do indeed run into unknowns who you have zero stats on.

90% of unknowns play the similarly. and of those 90% unknowns , 90% of time you're in a spot where a decision doesn't require too much of a read. Usually a straightfroward bet-call/shove/check-call/check-fold. It's very odd sometimes where you can check-call or bet-fold. But even then if the bet-sizing is 2/3 pot. bet-folding 2/3 is same as check-calling 2/3 and losing the pot.

the 0.1% where it's marginal a call/fold depending on aggression/history/read. . . .makes so little difference to your winrate. so go ahead~ spew that stack =)

to quote tommy angelo :
"the decisions that bothers us the most affects our winrates the least"
it's the standard easy plays that make up the bulk of our winrate.

Nice post.

Just one thing

I'ver read it twice and scanned all the replies once, so apologies if I've missed it somewhere, but what about the number of tables. Monster read IMO. Thinking stars at 10 NL here, so may not apply everywhere.

I'm prepared to label villian fish if they do most of the below on joining the table, even after 2-3 hands.

Post out the blinds
One table only not hidden
Limp and call
Short stack
no auto rebuy
chat

Poker is a game of probabilities; I'm sure there is a good poker player who does all of the above, but I have not found him/her on stars at 10 NL yet.

One other thing regarding good short stackers versus fish short stackers. It'll show itself after just a few hands because fish short stackers will play in the wrong spots with the wrong hands against the wrong villians with the wrong bet sizes.

I need to stop withdrawing my roll and buying expensive stuff! i yoyo between 25NL-200NL

Maybe read the post then? I play zoom too, the whole point is that we can start to make adjustments after very few hands (or without any hands).

Totally agree, i missed that one (and others)