[Mods please move this thread if this doesnt belong here]

I am posting my graph for the last 60 k hands or so played exclusively at nl16zoom SH. I have my stats below that as well. Clearly Im doing something wrong. In my opinion this stake is actually really soft but then this. If someone is able to clearly see whats going on here and give me a piece of advice I will be forever grateful. here they come.

graph nl16zsh ~60k hands


stats part 1


Stats part 2


This is probably the first time that Im losing from utg. i checked my nl 10, 5 and 2 put together and im winning at 19bb/100. over 145k hands (yeah I know)


Clearly my utg range looks horrid. Infact this is the first time I have had a look at my utg range after moving up. great result already imo (starting this thread). here we go

utg range



One Glaring leak - UTG range
wtsd% lol fold more? where? Flop? turn? river?

Again, if you need more stats Im ready to put it here. Thanks for coming this far.

My red and blue lines are the opposite of yours. If your red line goes up and blue line goes down then you're playing loose and aggressive and getting the worst of it.

Do you play faster when you think you don't have the best hand? It's good that you get a lot of folds, but you also need to get value at showdown.

If you think UTG is your leak, what does your graph look like for everything except UTG?

bluff catch less probably. I'm not going to point out some things but your won cash at SD is 46 which is a bit low.

Keep grinding and posting hands

I think this might be the wrong forum for this. We have a stats analysis thread in Beqinners Questions, and I think they have similar threads in sub-forums for each format (e.g. microstakes SH NL).

The pre-flop stats don't look all that bad, although I think you should play a fair bit tighter UTG until you fix some post-flop leaks. You're basically not pressing the FOLD button enough, which is why you're seeing a lot of showdowns with the worst hand.

Start by folding to 3-bets more often when you're OOP (something like 50% fold to 3-bet would probably be better for you), and you should probably cut down on the pre-flop cold-calls in position too.
It's quite interesting because the standard HUD stats for things like VPIP/PFR/3bet and C-bet would indicate you're a typical reg, but you're clearly losing money somewhere along the line. I think you probably need to develop your pot-control skills, such that you can induce more bluffs and then snap them off and be correct more often.

Add another couple of stats to the position report. How horrendous are your "WWSF Rating" and "River Call Efficiency" numbers? Both under 1.00 would be bad, and the latter would usually provide the motivation to control the pot size better and fold more often. If the WWSF Rating is way over 1.0, then you're probably a bit too aggro, but I'm not really sure.

Don't play this loose UTG, you seem to lose too much money. If you win +3,5bb/100 EV instead of -3,5bb/100 you'd be winning 3+bb/100 overall which is decent.

Obviously there is sample size but over that 10k hands UTG I'd be surprised if you were actually winning with the hands you are currently playing.

Note that if you fold 100% (including AA) you'd be losing less than you are now. It might be variance but 17,4% is already slightly higher than most charts would advice. Remove the hands below 15% and then reassess what hands are worth playing UTG.

Edit: for sure cut the A3o-A9o. Even though you made money in your sample they aren't likely to in the long run. Might wanna remove the QJo and KJo even though they look pretty. K2s is also not likely to be profitable on 99% of tables. Also all the 23s, 45s, 56s probably are losing money in that position.

definitely playing far too loose utg! do some study and work hard these games are very soft you should be able to crush them easily!

Wtsd% is way too high - this is why your blue line is so bad.....

You bluffcatch too much and probably overvalue toppair

Yeah I have been trying to achieve that. Bllue on top and red below.

Faster? You mean when Im bluffing do I make it quick?
The winrates are positive.

Thanks. Yeah W$SD goes down as WTSD goes up. Seems like they are inversely related for an average poker player.

Yead Id lose nothing (0bb/100). Looking to get the range in the 13 to 14% category. Should be easy.

Thanks for the input.

yeah I bluff catch way too wide and regs at my stake have started value betting 2nd pair otr vs me

Thanks for taking the time Arty.

Rusty helped me move the thread.


So what Ive figured is since Im slightly looser than majority of the regs here and my WTSD is high, I get to the river with a lot of Junk. So inessence what I mean is a 17/15 reg can afford to have a wtsd >30 cos he gets to the river with a strong range, not me.
Inducing bluffs is something I have never tried TBH and I try to value bet so freaking often that never end up giving my opponents an opportunity to bluff so they always end up calling with better and folding worse.

River call efficiency 1.08
W$WSF rating 1.08

Playing far too much oop
Too tight co/btn

You can steal wider BTN/CO.

SB cold call is maybe a bit too high. Mine is 8.2%. Remember that SB is the worst position in 6-max.

And yes your UTG range is too wide. Rule of thumb should be to open very tight from UTG. Only open wider if you have a good reason for it.

I wouldn't look too much at FT3B, since your PFR numbers are quite messy. Just make sure you don't call 3-bets with 54s, J7s or similar marginal hands.
If your opponent has low 3-bet %, then it's fine to play tight against his 3-bet, because your steals will be very profitable against him.

You can also 3-bet more on the BTN (~8% range) and I would expect people to play poorly against BTN 3-bets, meaning that they overfold.

Your biggest leak is calling too many rivers. Personally I believe that people in micros don't bluff enough. Some players bluff too much, but I would say many other players are very value heavy with their river bets.
But I'm a folding station, so my opinion is biased

And when I say "people don't bluff enough", I mean specially the river. Some players can have 80% flop cbet on the micros, and they will always bluff A/K cards. But I believe the overall tendency is that people are value heavy in big pots. And that there should be a polarization between people who are bluffing too much, and people who are not bluffing enough. But like I said my opinion is biased.

In case you like to triple barrel, I would say that don't try to make people fold top pair.

If you want to show more stats, I would be interested in your flop and turn check/raise %

I would also add "Raise first in" column next to PFR.

Many people have a huge problem when they transition from 5NL to 10NL, because they c-bet and barrel too often when they are OOP, and their opponents use their positional/informational advantage better than they do at 2NL. With hands like TPGK UTG vs BUT, you can get two streets of value from weak ranges by checking the flop or turn to induce floats/bluffs.
e.g. You raise KJs UTG, BUT flats 77. Flop J52, you c-bet, and button floats (he puts you on AK). Turn is a 9. You check, villain bets (executing the float play, trying to get you off overcards to his pair), but you don't fold. You call, because you have TPGK. River is whatever, you check and villain checks back. You win 2 streets of value.
If you bet the flop and turn, villain folds the turn, so you only get 1 street.

You can take a similar line with stronger hands to get 3 streets. e.g. bet-bet-check/call with TPTK or 2 pairs on wetter boards where the draws miss. It's much better than tripling, because villain isn't going to bluff-raise the river with a missed draw (he'll just fold), but he will bluff if you check to him.

These are better than expected. I really thought you'd be losing money on river calls, but you're better than breakeven. With slightly better pot control and more folding, you should be able to get the RCE up to 1.15 or something. At lower stakes (e.g. 2NL) it's possible to have a river call efficiency of 1.4, but that's sub-optimal from a game theory perspective, since it would indicate you were folding the best hand too often, or not betting the river often enough.
With a WWSF rating of 1.08, you're winning more than your "fair share" of pots (if not actual money), but I'm not sure if 8% more than 'typical' would be classed as excessive. Maybe 1.05 would be better. I don't know what kind of numbers the super-LAGs have, as most of the stats/graphs I've looked at have negative redlines, and it's usually more profitable to have a huge blueline instead. i.e. win fewer pots in total, but lose less by folding when it's prudent to do so. #MinimaxFTW

One final tip regarding cold-calling pre. Run the Quick Filter "Cold Call" while looking at the positional report. Pull up the heat map/matrices for each seat. It won't be hugely useful over this fairly small sample size (lol variance), but you might be surprised to see how few hands are actually profitable when you just press CALL pre.

Agreed. I think HEM calls it "UO PFR%", and looking at that basically tells us what your open-raise chart would look like.

Average River Call Efficiency from my sample of 200nl+ regulars is 1.70
That's maybe not GTO, but it seems to be working :P
Mine has been above 2 for a long time, but I recently started to bluff catch more and it dropped to 1.85.

I think Arty is mistaking GTO for polar vs bluff catcher. A subset of our river calls will be +EV calls that beat some of villain's value range but not enough to raise. Another subset of our calls are pure-bluff-catch calls or 0EV and it is only this subset that should be breakeven or 1.00 efficiency. So yeah basically this dude is calling too many rivers @ 1.08 efficiency I believe.

Edit: just saw that I am mistaken and nowhere does he say anything about 1.00 except in this post from ages ago (sorry for accidental stalk!), which I will post more than just the 1.00 bit as it has good suggestions for OP:

I dont think i am too tight from these positions. The VPIP doesnt paint the correct pic here.

I have included some the stats here. What a station I have been



Ive been following your blog and some of the folds you make.....are just ....

Yeah I donot give an opportunity for villain to bluff ever. I gues bet bet bet for value is drilled so hard in my thought process that I missout on so many good spots to check call.

My aim for next 60 k hands will be get my blue line to atleast breakeven if not winning. I suppose the red will automatically lower a bit.

I did run it and the hands a too few and its quite hard to tell. Though Overall when Im cold calling Im winning from all positions and breakevenish in CO.


Thanks I ve added these stats now.

THE UO PFR% numbers look fine to me, apart from UTG/MP which you should probably play tighter.
Going back to the RCE discussion, it seems like 1.08 is well below ideal for these games. Fishtankz mentioned 1.70 for 200NL regs, but that intuitively seems way too high to me. (I have no experience of stakes that high). In one of my databases I had an RCE of 1.35 (I'm quite bluff-catchy) while winning at 7.5bb/100, and when I looked at an alias for some of the biggest winners at 10NL, they had an average RCE of 1.50 over small samples.
Not sure if I said this before, but I don't think you have to change your style much. Just play a bit tighter pre when you're likely to be OOP, and check a few more boards with made hands, so that you have more hands you can call bluffs with, and thus have easier folds with the weaker parts of your range. It will take a while, but the blue and red lines will gradually swap places, and the green line should start going up more consistently. Good luck!

Thanks Arty Fishtankz and the rest who quipped in.

Seems to work My blue line seeing some sunlight already.