Introduction:

A month or so ago, I got a little frustrated by the most recent red line discussion thread in which half the posters were asking, “ZOMG, why is my red line so bad?” and the other half of the posters were drooling over positive red lines, and no one was really learning anything.

That's what led to this COTW. In it, I am going to do a few things:

Provide the definitive answer to “zomg, why does my red line suck?”
Show you pretty much all of the important red line spots.
Show you how to improve your red line without affecting your blue line significantly.
Analyze red line related stats for anybody who, after reading this COTW, can't figure out where or why they are losing money on their red line.

I. It's the Blinds, Stupid.

Here is my graph for the year, filtered for full ring (I've been playing a lot of 6m recently) and $100 and $200:



Here is my graph for the non-blind positions:



As you can see and extrapolate from these two graphs, my red line for just the blinds is about -$12,000



All of my losses come from folding preflop. Here are my blinds filtered for VPIP = True:



For the vast majority of you who have negative red lines, like me, the reason is simple: you're folding about 90% of your blinds.

Folding your blinds most of the time is fine. It is correct. It is smart. And it leads to a negative red line. Thus, A NEGATIVE RED LINE IS NOT A LEAK.

Now let me qualify that little bit: a negative red line is not necessarily a leak. Obviously, if your red line is too sharply angled downward, it will be a leak. So how much is too much?

Look at the red line above in both screen shots. For the year at these games I have won $6435. Breaking this down, I won $12,600 at showdown and lost the difference, $6165, on my red line. Thus, I retained a hair over 50% of my showdown winnings net of my red line losses.

Here is how it breaks down by position:



I fold the BB about 88% of the time. I fold the SB about 86% of the time. I lost a total of $12,856 folding my blinds preflop. I won a total of $1686 from the blinds without seeing a flop, and I won another $4293 when I saw the flop. This yields the blind losses, $6877, that show in my position stats.

These losses result in a blind loss rate of -15 big blinds per 100 hands I play in the small blind, and -44 big blinds per 100 hands I play from the big blind. These loss rates combine to be -59 big blinds per 100 orbits, or -.59 big blinds per orbit. This stat would be reported in Poker Tracker as -0.075 ptbb/hand and -0.22 ptbb/hand.

The bottom line is that for me, the blinds are a 6 bb/100 hands played drag on my win rate.

Thus, my overall win rate of 6.2 big blinds per 100 hands played represents blind losses of 6 big blinds per 100 hands, and non-blind winnings of 12.2 big blinds per 100 hands I play.

To be honest, my win rate is on the high side for a player losing -59 bb/100 orbits from the blinds. The reason I have this win rate despite my high blind losses is because my early position win rate is a bit on the high side (small sample variance is affecting all of my stats at the moment). In fact, it is difficult to achieve a win rate above 2.5ptbb/100 (5bb/100) if, like me, your blind losses are -59bb/100 orbits.

Most players have positional win rates that look something like this:

SB: -20bb/100
BB: -40bb/100
EP: 8bb/100
MP: 12bb/100
CO: 20bb/100
BTN: 26bb/100

Which yields a win rate per orbit of

SB: -.2
BB: -.4
EP: .08
EP: .08
MP1: .12
MP2: .12
MP3: .12
CO: .2
BTN: .26

.38big blinds per orbit or 4.18 bb/100 hands, or 2.09 ptbb/100.

Look at it another way. If your win rates are comparable to these, then every orbit, you are playing UTG, UTG+1, MP1, MP2, MP3 and 40% of the cut off just to pay for the red line losses you will take folding the blinds. Your profit can only come from the button and a portion of the cut off.

Marginal changes in your blind losses can have a big effect on your win rate. If you trim your blind losses from -60 to -52, UTG becomes a profit center for you, and your win rate goes from 4.18bb/100 to 5.06, and you become a 2.5ptbb/100 player. If you play 50,000 hands per month, that adds 4.4 buy ins to your monthly profit.
This is a red line post, not a blinds post, so I think I have to point out here that improvements in your blind losses will show up partly on your red line. Recall from above that my red line from the blinds when I volunteered to put money in the pot, was positive, as was my blue line. If we play 8bb/100 orbits better in the blinds, this will increase the upward slope of those red and blue lines.

OK, so how do we improve our blind play by 8bb/100 orbits?

For most people, the answer is to fold more. Here is my graph for when I cold call from the blinds:



And here is the same information from my position reports page:



Now take a look at this cold calling stat:



Please note that the number of cold calls went down, and the win rate went up. This is a dirt simple adjustment: I went to my holecards report, found a few hands that I was calling from the blinds and then losing more than if I had just folded them, and I deselected them in the hole cards tab. I found 83 cold calls that had cost me -$470, and I deleted them. If I had folded these hands, I would have only lost about $120. Thus, I can improve my results by $350 by folding these hands rather than calling with them. This makes perfect sense, if you choose the right hands. If I defend my BB with JTs, most of the time I am losing by check/folding the flop. I take a 3.0-3.5bb loss every time I check fold. Once I realize I can't defend profitably with JTs, I take my 1 bb loss per hand, yielding a 2bb improvement in my red line.

The bottom line is that if you want to improve your red line, look to your blinds first. Both your red line and your green line will thank you, as I have shown above.

(Part 2 to follow momentarily)

II.Some Other Red Line Leaks:

a. Not Stealing Enough: Every successful steal pays for an orbit of folding the blinds. Every successful steal is a 1.5bb non-showdown win that offsets an orbit where you fold the blinds. This is the main reason some Tag players are able to achieve a break even red line. Their average steal yields them a 1bb win. (Filter in HEM from the position report: Main Filters/Preflop Action Facing Player = Unopened; More Filters/PFR = True and note your win rate from the cutoff, button and small blinds. In PT3, Filter from the position tab Filters/Actions/Raise First In, and note your win rates as described). A player with an ATS of 45% means they are stealing 4.5 times out of 10. This stealing frequency yields 4.5bb in winnings for every 15bb in blinds posted. As we saw, my blind play loses 6bb/10 orbits. Thus, a player with an ATS of 45% and my blind losses has only a -1.5bb/100 hand deficit resulting from netting his steals and his blind play. By contrast, my ATS in this sample is a comparatively low 28%, and my actual deficit resulting from netting my blind losses and my steal profits is $3764, which works out to roughly a 3.2bb deficit.

It follows, then, that a loss rate from the blinds of -4.5bb/10 orbits and a stealing rate of 45% with an average win rate of 1bb per steal gets us to break even, and has your red line around break even, more or less, depending on how you play some other red line situations.

Thus far, we have identified two main red line leaks that most players have: they lose too much from the blinds, and they don't steal enough.

Plugging these two leaks is really all it takes to get your red line very close to break even. But there are a few situations where you can make some incremental changes to your red line.

b. Calling preflop 3 bets.

The principle at work here is exactly the same as when you call to defend your big blind. If you call a 3 bet and then fold the hand to a flop c-bet, you take a 10bb loss on your red line. If you fold, it is a 3bb loss on your red line. If you have a bad red line, by which I mean a red line that has losses in excess of 60% of your blue line winnings, you are probably calling too many 3 bets or playing them too fit or fold postflop.

So what you need to do here is to look at the hands you are calling 3 bets with, and change the way you play the categories of hands that are performing worse for you than if you had folded preflop.

c. Frequent C-betting mistakes.

I made a post in the stats thread a while ago in which I described players as being either “quality,” post flop players or “quantity,” post flop players. Which category you fall into is going to affect where you locate the potential improvements to your red line from improving your c-betting game.

Quality C-bettors:

A person is a quality C-bettor if he has a small gap between his flop c-bet% and turn c-bet%. In general, these players have a flop c-bet between 55% and 65% and a turn c-bet% between 40 and 50% (turn c-bet%s at the top of this range are very rare; most quality c-bettors are in the mid40s). These stats result from the quality c-bettor evaluating every situation to decide whether to c-bet; the quality c-bettor needs a good hand, a good board or a good situation to fire a c-bet.

If you are a quality c-bettor, your stats will look like this:

Filter in HEM: PFR=true, Flop C-Bet made = true.

Depending on how proficient you are, you will see a win rate of about 250bb/100 to 450bb/100.

Add the filter C-bet turn = True. Your win rate should increase to about 400bb/100 to about 600bb/100.

If your stats look like this, you are firmly in the “quality,” camp.

Here is the pile of money you should be examining to see if you can reduce your red line losses:



There's no quick fix; you have to go through your hand histories and the concept of the week on continuation betting, and try to decide whether you are missing good c-betting spots.

Quantity Players:

Quantity players are playing the probabilities, not their hand strength. They know that an average flop c-bet success rate is around 48% and that a 2/3 of the pot-sized c-bet only needs to work about 40% of the time to show a profit. Thus, quantity players just fire c-bets the vast majority of the time and rely on the other guy's folds to make him a profit. Quantity players don't worry too much about whether this is a good or bad c-bet spot; they tend to bet all but the worst situations.

You will know that you are a quantity player if you have a flop c-bet stat up over 70% and a turn c-bet that is very low—in the neighborhood of 30-40%. Your win rate when you filter for PFR = True, Flop C-bet made = True will be significantly lower than the quality player's—it will be in the 70-200bb/100 range depending on a variety of factors, including your skill. If you add the filter, Saw Turn = True and your win rate goes negative, Congratulations! You are a true small ball flop LAg.

If you are a quantity player, the main place you should look for your red line losses is PFR = True, Flop C-bet Made = True, Saw Turn = True and Turn C-bet made = False.

This spot is negative for almost everybody, of course; the key here for quantity players is the number of hands that show up in this spot. All of those -7bb losses you'll see there are hands on which you could either have lost 3.5bb (by not c-betting the worst flops) or won the hand by adding in some double barrels.

d. Miscellany:

There are a few other spots that affect your red line incrementally, and that you should be thinking about. But collectively, they are probably less important to your red line than simply fixing your blind play. Here are two more which are pretty important:

Floating success. Filter for did cold call = true and called flop c-bet = true. Just keep in mind here that every time you call preflop and fold to a c-bet, it is a small loss on your red line. Conversely, every time you execute a successful call/bluff, you have “paid for,” about 1.3 hands where you cold call and then fold the flop. If you fold too much on the flop, you'll have a negative red line here. If yur floating strategy is successful, your red line will be positive or close to break even.

Light 3 betting from the blinds. Filter from the position page: More Filters/Did 3 bet = True/Saw Flop = true, Hole cards/deselect AA, KK, QQ and AK. If your red line is not solidly positive here, you are leaking by either c-betting too much or not enough. Bear in mind that if you have a solid win rate 3 betting light from the blinds (about 1.2bb/hand), you can realize a 2.2bb/hand improvement on your red line for every 3 bet from the big blind you add. DON'T MISS GOOD SPOTS TO 3 BET OUT OF INATTENTION, FEAR OR LAZINESS.



III. Conclusion

There is one important point that bears repeating and expanding on: The direction of the slope of your red line, in and of itself, is not important. I am, along with many others, beating $200 for a solid win rate despite having red line losses of 50% of my blue line winnings.

The direction of your red line basically describes the style of your play, not the quality of your play. My philosophy of poker is basically to wait for a good situation, and exploit it maximally. I take a lot of small losses when I elect not to c-bet the flop, or elect not to float or, most frequently, when I decide to fold my blinds.

Other, equally successful players have a different philosophy. They tend to take bigger losses than I take attempting to exploit more marginal situations more often.

The slope of your red line is what describes the quality of your play. Within the universe of players who play a quantity style (the style most likely to result in an upward sloping red line) how steeply upward is your red line? Within the universe of quality players (the style most likely to result in a downward sloping red line) how downward sloping is your red line?

The key is the ratio of red line wins or losses to blue line wins or losses. There is nothing inherently superior in winning 12bb on your red line and losing 6 on your blue line (as is common among loose aggressive players) compared to winning 12 on your blue line and losing 6 on your red line.

Some people claim that the positive red line style is inherently harder to play against. They say “nits,” like me with negative red lines are destined for lower win rates and are easier to play against, and that Lag players have higher win rates.

In my experience, this is simply false for 99% of players playing up through NL $200. At this point, I actually know the achieved win rates of a significant fraction of winning regulars at all stakes from $25 through $400. I can say unequivocally that the average Tag's win rate at those levels is indistinguishable from the average Lag's win rate. The reason is simple: no one is playing any where near the theoretical maximum win rate for their style. The admitted theoretical advantages of playing a Lag style simply disappear into the mistakes that mere mortal Lag players make on a regular basis.

Your red line is not important in and of itself. It is only important to the extent that it shows that you may have some leaks that happen to show up on your red line.

IV. Red line analysis.

I said at the outset that I would analyze red line-related stats and graphs ITT. The requirements for posting a stat or graph are that you have read this post, run the filters described herein, and still have a question relating to them. If you meet these requirements and want to post a red line related question, please do so. I will delete any questions that evidence a failure to have either read this post or to have run the filters I listed.

1rd

Read, and think that I need to read this once a day for the next month to digest it.

This is great stuff - thanks!!

First! Will read after tennis sesh

EDIT: Damn you tv for distracting me

3rd. Another leak identified, thanks.

One other area, perhaps not in the micros, is over 3betting in the blinds. Your thoughts on this would be appreciated.

You mind sharing from your experience how the positional winrates usually differ for 6max? Do the blind losses need to go down or the co/btn go up more to compensate for less non-blind positions? thanks.

Great most mpethy. I'm going to put off runnig filters until after I get in my required volume for the month which will probably be at 11:59 on the 31st.

Thank you for the opportunity to clarify and expand on what I wrote about 3 betting light from the blinds.

If you are playing your light 3 bets reasonably well, you will have a win rate of about 1.2bb/light 3 bet from the blinds.

This is a pretty thin spot. You're out of position with a fairly weak holding wagering, on average, 10bb preflop, plus the post flop action, to net a 1.2bb profit per hand.

It follows from this that even a small increase in the amount of mistakes you make above average in light 3 bets from the blinds can devastate your win rate. For example, if you 3 bet 20 times for a 1.2bb average win, all of those profits can disappear into a single turn double barrel that you should have check/folded instead. In those 21 light 3 bets, you 3 bet 21 times. You'll get called about 47% of the time, call it 10 times, giving you 10 c-bet opportunities, of which you will bet about 70%, or 7 of them. So you make a minimum of 28 bets in these 21 3 bet spots, and a single extra mistake, that bad turn double barrel, representing less than 4% of your bets, completely wipes out your profit.

THIN, THIN, THIN!!!

What I frequently see from players at micro and small stakes is that they are making enough mistakes to turn what ought to be a marginally profitable situation (light 3 betting) into a marginally unprofitable one.

You are 3 betting too much for your skill level, regardless of what your 3 bet% is from the blinds, if your win rate in your light 3 bets (in a big sample) is below break even. If it is positive but below 1.2bb, you have a small leak.

Micro and small stakes grinders make a lot of different mistakes in 3 bet pots. The most common leaks are:

1. The preflop decision to 3 bet this hand against this player. 3 betting strat is simply too complex to discuss this in more detail here. But the problem is usually with the preflop decision.
2. The decision whether to c-bet.
3. Stacking off light.

Most of this doesn't have a major effect on your red line. I mean, sure, if you make a bad double barrel and c/f the river, you'll take a 48bb or so hit on your red line. But that's pretty rare. But since these leaks are not primarily a red line leak, I didn't spend a lot of time on them.

A significant leak for many micro players that does show up on the red line is not 3 betting enough from the blinds. As I mentioned in my OP, if you have a big sample of light 3 bets in which you are winning at 1.2 bb or so, but your 3 bet% is low, you may be missing opportunities to swing your win rate by 2.2bb/hand for each missed light 3 bet. I see plenty of micro and small stakes grinders who have super high win rates with their light 3 bets--they are missing all of the "this is close, but probably a slightly +EV 3 bet" situations. You'll fall in this category if your light 3 betting from the blinds win rate is above 2bb/hand, more than likely.

Win rates in 6 max in the non-blind positions are very comparable to those for the same position at full ring; they tend to deviate to the high side, but remain pretty close.

So for a solid 6 max grinder, you might see non-blind positional win rates of

EP: 10 bb/100
MP: 14 bb/100
CO: 26 bb/100
BTN: 32 bb/100

I'm not sure I have ever seen a 6 max grinder with these exact win rates, but almost everybody is pretty close to all of these win rates.

This yields a per orbit win rate of:

EP: .1
MP: .14
CO: .26
BTN: .32

So you have a win rate of .73 per orbit from the non-blind positions. There are 16.6 orbits per 100 hands, so your win rate here would be 13bb/100, or 6.5ptbb/100, without considering your blind losses.

So it is a somewhat simple matter to determine what win rates would result from various loss levels in the blinds.

If you take the worst case scenario, which is that your blind losses are the same -.6/orbit that a FR grinder can tolerate, you get blind losses of .6 x 16.6 = 9.96, call it -10bb/100, and you have a 3bb/100 or 1.5ptbb/100 win rate.

Here are a few more assuming the non-blind win rates listed above:

Blind losses/orbit -.55, win rate is 4bb/100, 2ptbb/100
blind losses/orbit -.5, win rate 4.67bb/100, 2.33ptbb/100
blind losses/orbit -.45, win rate 5.5bb/100, 2.75ptbb/100
blind losses/orbit -.40, win rate 6.33/100, 3.15ptbb/100

Obviously, you can mix and match here. If you hold constant all of the non-blind win rates, except for the button, which you increase to .41 (about the highest I can remember seeing for a 6 max grinder), then you can achieve a higher win rate with the same loss rate from the blinds.

The important take away here is to quantify the common sense observation that playing the blinds 1/3 of the time rather than 2/9 of the time increases the relative importance to your win rate of optimizing your blind play in 6 max.

Now intrested in "major leak finder." Please PM.

I am a small ball flop LAG!

10 points added to my manliness.

Nice post mpethy. Posts like this can't be absorbed fully in one sitting so I'll have to look through it a couple of times again.

way to make hem your bitch!

mpethy, great post.

I have a both a positive red and blue line at NL100, and agree with all your points. I firmly believe in W$WSF as one of the important stats to look at in discussing redline. I also like to keep less than a 10% gap between my Flop and Turn cbet percentage. This means you have to know your opponent and their tendencies.

One of the best ways to increase your redline is BvB situations.

Just to add to a point that Mpethy made about floating...

Something I have been noticing while looking through DB's lately are big divots in redline. Upon running some filters I find that these happen from bad 3b spots, bad 4bet spots, or spots where the player is floating. The floating spot can be "meh"...but I have been noticing people getting carried away with it and doing things like double float/folding on the river. This puts a ton of money in (3bb PF, 5bb on the flop, and 9bb on the turn) for a massive gap that rarely gets to blueline. Now, doing floating or dub floating isn't bad perse...but make sure that you are not constantly dub floating in really bad spots. The float can be a bit more liberal, but the dub float should really only be done in very clear spots where you know exactly how you are going to win the pot (either using a variety of bluff cards, we have the best hand and are planning on showing down, etc).

Great article Mpethy =)

I'm going to pick on you a little bit to make a point I was planning to make when somebody mentioned playing TAg with both a positive red line and a positive blue line. I'm glad you were the first one to raise the point, because everybody will see the justice in the conclusion I reach regarding your play.

As Sammy and I agree, to play with a break even or positive red line, you have to be able to do all of the following things:

Cold call profitably from the blinds.
Steal with a high frequency, and with a positive win rate.
Float in position profitably.
3 bet light profitably from the blinds.

Let's look at these situations individually and see what skills they exemplify:


There are 4* advantages a player can have when playing NLHE:

Hand strength
Position
Skill
Initiative

When you cold call from the blinds profitably, you demonstrate that you can use hand strength and skill to profit.

When you steal profitably, you demonstrate that you can use position and initiative to beat your game.

When you 3 bet light from the blinds for a profit, you have demonstrated that you can use initiative and skill to beat your game.

When you cold call in position for a profit, you have demonstrated that you can use position, skill and initiative to beat your game.

Here's what all of these situations have in common: They are spots from which you can expect to extract, at best, a marginal profit. The point is that if you are doing them all for a profit, your red line will be break even or positive, because you have the ability to use all 4 possible advantages to extract a profit.

A player like Sammy demonstrates by his positive win rates on both his red and blue lines that he can extract a profit from all of the important marginal spots. In order to do so, he has to have a significant skill edge at his stake, and, therefore, his primary leak is

wait for it



Because all of these spots are marginal, they are also very good descriptors of your skill edge regarding the skills they utilize.

The clear implication of this fact is that they become the first stats to go south when you move up stakes.

It is hard to pull a profit cold calling from the blinds. If it is hard at NL $50, of course it will be incrementally harder when you move up to $100. Thus, one of the first things you should expect to see when you move up is for your blind loss rate to get worse.

This, in turn, suggests that your play in these marginal spots should be in a constant state of flux.

If you are cold calling from the blinds with a 1.3bb/hand win rate and you have no immediate plan to move up, then the logical adjustment for you to make is to cold call a slightly wider range. Maybe you can add KJ and QJ to your calling range and play them break even. That changes a 1bb loss to a 0bb situation. Every starting hand you can add to the range of hands you play for less of a loss than 1bb/hand is a hand that you should add to your calling range.

Conversely, when you move up, tighten up. Drop the marginal hands that you added as your skill edge at the lower stake increased, and keep only the clearly profitable hands. Open up as your skill increases to the new level. Rinse and repeat for the next higher stake. EZ game.

The same principle holds for the other marginal spots. My win rate stealing went to **** when I moved up from $100 to $200. In a very disciplined way, I reduced my ATS while I studied hand histories for the necessary adjustments, and I am currently in the process of opening it back up.

___________________________

*excluding a superuser's ability to see your hole cards, ldo.

nice work mpethy

very nice. Just skimmed the major sections, but will look at them more in-depth sometime this week for sure and might post some questions as well

edit: decided to just do it right now instead

My flop c-bet % is 70, and turn is 50 (both on the high end/quantity not quality c-betting). Yet my WR for flop c-bet = 300 and turn c-bet = 760, both of which you say are pretty decent numbers. Does that mean I'm just running hotter than the sun with my c-bets right now, or are my slightly higher than normal c-bet %'s fine?

Did Mpethy just win the internet?

I think so.

WD.

sick cotw - I hope this leads to regs posting their sexy red lines! lol

nice post mpethy.

definitely helped me plug some leaks. although my redline isn't tragic, i can no longer blame it on basic nature of the blinds, because i am actually winning from the SB @ 5.94bb/100 and losing from the BB @ -30.15bb/100 over non-insignificant samples.

/end thinly-veiled brag

thanks to this COTW I decided to re-look at my blind play after not having done so for a couple of months....-85 bb/100 . Found my #1 leak most likely.

Also I find it really amusing that my numbers for bb/100 for my positions go exactly as yours do: CO > BU > EP > MP > blinds

wow, very nice and I know what I'm going to be doing tonight! Many thanks for this!

should i add turn cb possible = true? when i dont put it, it makes a 20 stack difference over a 150k hand sample because of people donking and all ins otf

Just 3b every hand and go all in on the flop then ur redline would be good,

redline is so overrated,

but i wont derail this thread Nice Job

I thoroughly enjoyed your cotw and have much respect for your ability to analyze stats. Glad to get an opportunity to have you look at my cbet stats.

25nl 13/10/2.5 fr player with a large sample

My flop cbet is at 69% and turn cbet at 60%. My cbet % is much higher than you suggested. Are there any weakness that you can pick apart by 1. the %'s I listed and 2. the graphs I show below. I created the first 2 graphs as described in section IIc and the third is my overall red line graph. Your help is greatly appreciated.