Ace:

I can't tell from the basic stats you posted what is going on. Your stats actually look pretty good.

I'd suggest that you run the filters in my long post above on blind leaks, and see what is going on.

One thing I will add is that playing from the blinds is a very marginal spot. It doesn't take many big bluffs getting snapped off to wreck your win rate. That's probably not the entire problem you have in the blinds, but if you've had a few go bad recently, it could be a decent chunk of the overall problem.

If a decent chunk of your excess losses are attributable to some big bluffs, and you are happy that the bluffs were good ones, then it's just variance.

Run some of the filters I posted above, and post again if you have any questions interpreting your results or if the filters don't disclose any leaks.

Hi I have ats of 35%, run 15/12 and have a fold to 3b of about 78%. I'm wondering if this fold to 3bet is a leak. I know it's exploitable and that mathematically the point that can't be exploited is close to 65% but the thing is I feel like there are so many nits 3betting me which is why I fold so much. I've played a lot of hu and so I am used to not folding to 3bets much hu if the guy is aggro but I just feel like a lot of guys only 3b me with fairly strong ranges, even when I open LP. Thoughts?

Could someone tell me what good losses from the SB and BB are in FR 100? I realise the answer probably is 'it depends' but I was just wanting to have something to compare my figures against.

Edit: nvm, missed the stake information.

My somewhat detailed blog post on this subject. (DoubleFlyPoker)

I have a "standard" ATS range from the SB of about 20% (I tailor this range of course, but against many regs I employ this standard range). I simply want to know how this compares to averages?

thanks

You're definitely tighter than average.

I'm at 31%

I see a lot of people in the mid to high 20s. I see quite a few in the 40s; they seem to be polarized in their results--either crushing or getting crushed.

I really think that an average would be misleading, because a graph of the stats I have seen would have a double hump--one at about 26% and one at about 40%, with precipitous declines on the left right and between the humps, if you can visualize that.

Very interesting. My ATS tightness in SB is probably just born out of my obsession not to play a lot of pots oop with weak holdings.

So, I just am trying to understand... people who are ATS SB 40% are raising **** like 87o, Q4s. I would think that to do this profitably, the BB must be an absolutely terribly predictable and tight reg. I might spend some time looking at various hand categories profitability for me in this spot.

Mpeth, how do you know so much about playing statistics? This seems like your specialty or something, it's pretty remarkable. What do you currently play? I'm just curious. Also, sorry if you have already discussed this somewhere else here.

Yeah, but look at your steal success rate from the SB. Mine is 64%; you don't play most of the time you raise to steal the BB.

Most people fold most of the time, so most of the time the cards you have are irrelevant.

people also 3 bet a lot from the BB; I face a 3 bet 12% of the time, for example. I just fold about 37% and 4 bet about 44% and occasionally call.

also, it is just you and the BB left. any top 50% hand rates to be the favorite (because trash is overrepresented in the hands the other 7 players folded, this is a slight exaggeration). So you can actually think of a 30% ATS as pure value raising.

It's a long and boring story. The cliffs are that I ran so unbelievably bad for the first 500k hands I played on FTP that I started thinking of every possible way you could run bad and then checking to see if I had been (usually I was).

Then, one day, after using PokerEVsoftware for the first time, I saw that, while my actual winrate was essentially 0, my EV adjusted WR for that 500k sample was 1.4ptbb/hand. My first thought was "I KNEW I was running bad!!!"

My second thought was, "wow, 1.4ptbb sucks; you suck at poker. Maybe you should focus more on getting better, cuz if you had been a 3ptbb winner you would have booked a win for the year net of even this pretty horrible run bad."

So I turned my attention to using the software to improve, rather than just to find all my bad luck.

Since then, I have done the one hour DB analysis for maybe 350 people, and the 2 or 4 hour DB analysis for maybe 200. So that's a thousand or so hours looking at how the field of winning regulars perform in a variety of different areas of their game.

Edit: ATM I am a modest winner at NL $200 Rush.

Question for you guys. Do you know if you are supposed to be a winner out of the SB when it is unopened to you? So no action facing you.

This just links me to an article about losses from the blinds?

This is this Saturday's post...

[Mpethybridge's Guest Post continued from last week. He is a principal contributor/moderator to the SSFR Stats Thread and is a Poker Coach specializing in database analysis.]


2. Three Betting Light.


The single most common 3 betting leak people have at 6 max is 3 betting the wrong hands against the wrong people. This gets them into all sorts of nasty, -EV spots post flop that exacerbates the leak.


Here is how you go about determining whether you have a 3 betting light leak:


a. Do you have a 3 betting leak (from the blinds, for this discussion)?


Go to the position report. then go to filters and add "3 bet preflop = true" Then go to the holecards HE tab, and select all cards, then deselect AA, KK, QQ and AK (both).


Look at your blind win rates. The following should all be true in a big sample:


i. You should have more raises from the BB than the SB.


ii. Your SB WR should be higher than your BB win rate.


iii. Your win rates should average about 1.2bb/hand.


Higher is better, lol, and the further you are below 1.2bb/hand, the bigger your potential leak (obviously variance is always a complete to partial explanation for any win rate in a small sample).


If you have a leak, here is how to figure out whether it is a preflop leak or a post flop leak. As I said earlier, the most common leak is 3 betting the wrong hands against the wrong people. So here is how you look for that one:


b. 3 Betting the Wrong Hand Against the Wrong People:


Basically what we are doing here is looking for your understanding of fold equity.


i. Filter for your pure bluff 3 betting hands.


Go to the holecards report and note all of the trash starting hands that you 3 bet in the sample. You know, the J5o, the 720, the 53s type hands that you 3 bet.


ii. Check your win rate.


If your win rate with these hands is below the benchmark 1.2bb/hand, you may have a leak.


iii. Do a Hand History review of these hands Analyzing Villain stats.


This isn't nearly as tedious as it sounds; it is actually kind of fun. In the hand display window below your stats, click on to highlight the first hand, right click on it, and click "replay all hands"


In the replayer, make sure villain stats are displayed from your HUD and then look at the fold to 3 bet and fold to flop c-bet stats on all of the villains (add them to your HUD if you don't have them on there already--if you don't have them on there already, their absence is probably your leak!)


What you are looking for here is confirmation that your plan makes sense. Every hand you see where you 3 bet trash against a villain who didn't have a high fold to 3 bet or a high fold to flop c-bet is almost certainly a bad decision. You should see a a parade of players whose stats are high for one or both of these -- either he folds preflop a lot, or he folds postflop a lot, or you made a mistake by bluffing in a spot where you didn't have sufficient fold equity.


iv. Filter for your light value 3 bets.


Depending on your habits, this range is probably stuff like AQ, AJ, KQ, TT, 99 and 88, maybe a few more hands in that range.


iv. Check your win rate.


If it is a problem, you may have a leak.


v. Cue them up in the replayer.


Check the stats of the villains you played the hands against. Are they people who will call the 3 bet with a range that is primarily comprised of hands you're ahead of? if so, good, but if you see a lot of questionable 3 bets here, this is likely the cause.


An interesting and useful exercise (and this one IS tedious, sorry) is to do this:


1. Pick a villain OTB on a steal who you 3 bet for light value.

2. Note his steal % (let's say it is 40%)

3. Note his fold to resteal % (let's say it is 70%).

4. Note that this tells us he continues with 12% of starting hands (30% of 40%).


We can assume that he will 4 bet his premiums most of the time for most people, so we eliminate those from his range. The remainder of those 12% are his calling range.


5. Run it through Poker Stove against each of the hands in your light value 3 betting range.


If none of the foregoing analysis has disclosed a leak (extraordinarily unlikely) then your primary leak in 3 bet pots is almost certainly in your post flop play.


c. Finding Post flop Leaks in 3 bet Pots


The easy place to start here is to go to your position page. If they are not currently displayed, go to your stat selection box and add flop c-bet %, turn c-bet %, flop c-bet success % and turn c-bet success %.


I have to generalize here, because people play differently. But basically the idea here is to check the profitability of your c-bets. If your average c-bet is 60% of the pot, you need a success rate of 40% to break even on the c-bet. So what you will do here is to figure out a guesstimate of what your average c-bet is, and figure out what success rate you need for it to break even. Then you look at your actual success rates to see whether they are at or above what you need them to be.


Assuming your success rates are below where you need them, then this is the explanation for why your win rate is not where you want it. But it is not the leak in your game.


To find the leak, there is no choice but to do hand history reviews, and look for patterns.


Here are two of the really big leaks I see in the way people play specific hands from the blinds Both of these leaks relate back to the cold calling from the blinds discussion:


1. A call too far.


All solid players have internalized the flop check/call as the standard line on the flop to exploit the field's tendency to bet their air on the flop. It is very common for players to turn off their brains and go into check/call mode. This leads them to make calls on two streets where only one is justified by the villain's tendencies, to call three streets where only two are justified, or, maybe worst of all, to make only two alls when three are justified.


2. Never leading into the pre-flop raiser.


I'm not a big fan of donking in general, but every play has its time and its place.


Remember that the theoretical justification for check/calling is that you are trying to get value from the villain's air, in addition to his second best value. If you can't get value from the villain's air by check/calling, then there is no reason for you to check/call. Two spots in which you likely will not get value from the villain's air are:


a. Facing a good player on a wet board. Most solid players do not c-bet air on wet boards as a matter of routine. This is especially true when they respect your game, because they know they'll face a play a high percentage of the time. If he won't c-bet his air, then there is no value in checking--you're just giving him a free card on a wet board.


You have to read your opponent, the board texture and meta-game considerations; but checking here is not automatically the best play.


b. Facing any player with a low turn c-bet stat. At FR, tons of players have a flop c-bet in the 70s and a turn c-bet in the 40s. Stats like these indicate a player against whom check/calling the flop is clearly the best play, but the turn is actually much closer. He checks back a huge number of turns with marginal showdown value that might call a bet from you.


Again, evaluate the specific villain's tendencies, the board texture and any meta-game considerations before auto-checking again on the turn to a player with a low turn c-bet stat.


The way most players play (in auto-check/call mode) winds up being a leak. In a big sample of hands where you flop, say, second pair: because you are in check/call mode, you wind up calling, say, 1.8 streets on average when you lose, and 1.3 streets when you win. Not incidentally, by going into and staying in check/call mode, you are allowing the villain to realize all of his air's equity, too.


You'll probably laugh at the idea, but this long article is really just a very brief summary of the work that goes into analyzing a blind play leak. In most database reviews I do, I spend half the 4 hours just identifying the various blind leaks, and assigning the client "homework" hand history reviews to work on plugging the leak.


This post really only skims the basics, but should get you started on finding and plugging what is usually the biggest leak players have.

Hi guys. I've read the last few paged that tex and it is very useful.
But can you tell me what is (more or less) normal winrate (bb/100) in fullring for EP, MP, LP and especially in SB and BB?
Would really appreciate that. Thanks in advance.

Here's Newman's (a DC coach):

Newman's WRs are all a bit on the high side (not surprisingly).

Normal is more like:

SB: -20
BB: -45
EP: 08 to 10
Middle: 15
CO: 22
BTN: 30

Which works out to probably something like 4bb/100 (just swagged the math and it looks like 4.2bb if I did it right)

Hmm... mine are anything but normal then...

SB: -10
BB: -22
BTN: 16

Looks like I have a leak on the button.

Cangurino,

mpethy posted in bb and you posted in ptbb which explains the great differences

No, I posted in bb. The rates for EP through CO also fit Matt's numbers.

I also just realized that this is the SS version of this thread and not the micros - it's confusing when your subscribed to two threads with the same title. The data above are from NL10, sorry guys.

is the sample size significant? if so that is crazy to be so far off from the majority of other players

It's based on over 50k hands with at least 5 players dealt in.

Optimal Stealing percentage compared to F3B?

So if I compare my winnings from stealing vs my losses when F3B, I am positive but how positive should I be or what WR should be expected.

This is a really interesting way to look at the button, but I haven't looked at it in exactly this way, so I can't answer your precise question.

Here's how I examine a player's button stealing range:

In HEM, on the main filters page, deselect all "actions facing player" except unopened. (PT3 is actions tab/click raise first in box)

In more filters, add PFR = True, save and close.

On the position report, you'll be looking at your win rate for your steals.

Win rate in this spot tends to correlate with your stealing %; in general, I see people between 80-120bb, obviously inversely correlated with ATS between, say, 25 and 40.

If you're in this range, you probably don't have a serious problem

Step two is to go back to more filters and add "saw flop = true." (PT3 is misc. tab/situations tab/click saw flop box).

I look for your win rate to go up here. If it doesn't I can normally find a systematic leak in your c-betting game. There are too many variables and potential leaks to list here, but the general rule is that if your win rate goes down when you see the flop, you have at least one of the several potential leaks.

thanks for responding. I am trying to dig a little deeper though. If a player steals a lot, they probably have more folds to 3bets. So there should be a relationship there right. Balancing that seems best but I am not sure how to know if I fold to 3 bets too much, if my steal % is really high.

To verify you did mean if the win rate goes up, not the amount won right?

correct