Sort of stuck in a rut to be honest so would appreciate any input here. I know I must be super-leaky but when I review big hands I'm usually happy with how I played them. Probably just deluded, or just missing leaks in other areas.

Stats are all NL50 on various sites, mainly 20ish-tabling

Thanks in advance.

Your blind loss rates are the problem with your red line. Read any of my many recent posts on blind losses. Basically, you are probably losing a lot of money cold calling out of theblinds, completing the small blind, and not fighting for the pot when you get a free look from the big blind.

Your aggression factor is too low. You are not betting and raising enough, and you are calling too much, postflop.

Your win rate on the button is low. You need to analyze your steals to determine whether you are making money postflop on your steals that get called.

Your button W$SD is too low; you are getting to showdown too light, probably by not folding some steals where you flop a medium strength hand.

You're not stealing nearly enough from the cut off.

You're not c-betting the flop enough.

This is a pretty standard LAg graph (except for the low-ish overall WR). You are going to showdown a little too often for a LAg (or a TAg for that matter). But it is completely normal for a LAg red line to be positive and for a TAg red line to be negative.

Your overall WR is a little on the low side for $25, so you have some significant leaks in your LAg game. I can't really tell what they are from the graph and stats you posted. Off the top of my head, I'd say you are probably 3 betting too liberally preflop, and it looks like you are getting to showdown way too often.

1. Your loss rate in the big blind is too high. This could be because you are not making enough of a profit when you cold call to off set the fact that you fold 92% of the time. One thing you will want to do is to defend more often by 3 betting stealers more liberally than you do.

Your WTSD$ at 30% and your W$SD of 56% indicates that you are taking waaaay too many winning hands to showdown. This, in turn, suggests that you are not getting max value from your hands. You should be betting your top pair+ hands much more aggressively.

Your attempt to steal is way too low. You need to look for people who fold to steals and then steal close to 100% of the time against them until they adjust.

Your small blind vpip/pfr is unbalanced. you are cold calling and completing too much. run some filters to find out the unprofitable parts of your cold calling and completing ranges, and start folding them.

Your cut off win rate is too low. This is a combination of playing too tight (you need to be opening a much wider range of hands) and probably playing them too weak/tight post flop.

Your W$WSF is about 3% too low; this indicates that you are failing to win some pots when you have a medium strength hand that is ahead, but you fold to pressure, and some pots where you do not have the best hand, but your opponent cannot really call a bet.

The major problem I saw with your game was a significant lack of positional awareness, both preflop and postflop.

Look at your preflop stats: They basically hover around 8/7 until the hijack, go up to 11/9 or so on the cut off, and then jump all the way up to 16/10 or something on the button.

Look, there are two theoretical reasons to play adjust your opening range by position:

1. The likelihood that you will be last to act post flop. Obviously, this goes up as your position moves toward the button, and you are guaranteed to have position when you are playing the button. Based on this, we can correctly open our range a bit each position. It is not the main reason we open our range as we approach the button, but it is an important consideration.

2. The probability that you have the best hand. Oversimplifying a bit, but just look at it this way. If you are UTG in a 9-handed game, there are 9 hands dealt, and 8 hands left to act after you. In order to be reasonably confident you have the best hand UTG, you need to have a top 11% hand, more or less. The reason most TAg players don't play the top 11% of hands from UTG, though, is because of point 1--there are a lot of players left to act behind, most of whom can play the hand against you with a positional advantage. So TAgs tend to compensate for the disadvantage of playing out of position by tightening up their opening range some.

When you are UTG+1, and UTG has folded, there are now only 7 players left to act, so a top 14% hand rates to be the favorite.

When you are in the CO, there are only 3 people left to act, so a top 25% hand rates to be the best hand and can be opened for a value raise.

See? The fewer people left to act, the lighter we can open for a value raise, not just on a steal.

So the bottom line is that the range you are playing is missing a lot of value. You are folding a lot of hands that are the best remaining hand in play. Doing so in the earlier positions is just a small leak, because the profitability of marginal hands goes down, and can become negative, due to the postflop positional disadvantage. But the later your position, the bigger the mistake you are making by keeping your preflop opening range as tight as it is.

There is very little that doesn't look leaky.

The two big things you have to work on for right now are your blind play and your button play.

Blind play: I have written the same thing over and over. Check your cold calling profitability. Check your profitability completing the small blind. resteal. I have made numerous lengthy posts on this subject on this page, and you should read all of them.

Button: check your postflop profitability with your stealing range. You need to be making a profit when your steals get called. so filter for your steals (raised first in). look at your co and btn and sb win rates. write them down. then filter for saw flop. your wr should GO UP. If it doesn't it means you are playing your steals poorly postflop, and you will have to do some fundamental work regarding when you should cbet and when you shouldn't, how many streets of value you should be trying for, the best lines to get that number of streets with, and whether you should be calling river bets.

Your major problem is the blind loss rates. It could just be variance, but I doubt it. Your vpip/pfr stats are pretty bad from the blinds, and they are the likely source of your problem. Read some of my posts above for tips on how to sort out blind play.

This isn't the first time that I've heard my vpip/pfr from the blinds were poor. I was wondering what exact numbers I should be aiming for, as I am not really sure what my blind vpip/pfr is telling me about my play.

I'd like to ask you about this, mpethy. Won't the two parts of the equation end up offsetting one another? What I mean is, if you start betting your hands harder you'll inevitably push people off their hands - so you'll get more value on early streets but lose value later. Taking winning hands to showdown may win you the same amount of money but stretched over 3 streets instead of just 1 or 2. Is this flawed thinking?

Curious, what were the main changes you made to your game in this LAG project? Big jump in postflop aggression?

If you know playing TAg/LAg is good poker, why do you become a loose passive fish in the small blind, and a tight passive fish in the BB?

There are a wide range of stats that can win from the blinds--the point is just to play TAg in all positions. So, for example, I see people with good loss rates playing:

BB: 11/8
SB: 16/13

But there is no set of optimal stats.

You won't always fold them off of their hand. If you have AA and bet/bet/bet, sometimes they will call/call/call, and sometimes they will call/call/call. So you wind up getting 2.x streets of value from AA rather than 2 or 1.9 or something.

Where it really makes a difference is in hands where they draw out on you on the river. You avoid a fraction of hands where you bet/check-call/check-call (or bet-call) and they got there on you, when you bet/bet and they fold.

In some hands, yes, we are talking about hands where you are moving some blue line winnings to red line winnings. But you are also moving some blue line LOSSES to red line winnings, and you are also moving some red line losses to red line wins (such as when you have JJ on a K high board; if you bet flop, check fold turn, you are getting bluffed a lot; when you bet the flop and then bet the turn and they fold, you have changed a loss into a win).

please help me with my leaks!
10nl: no problems
25nl: again no problems 3betting light here was a lot of fun
50nl: I switched to this level, moved to 50bb only tables (so games got tighter) and with $1500.






I tilted about $200, so i will admit i made that major error. I think besides that i am just running very bad but i am sure i have some glaring leaks. Sorry the sample size is small but i hit my stop loss and decided to move down. Please help me evaluate what little i did.



Random chatter: I took a fairly specific (same) line with so many hands, but its like they always knew my cards. Always called my air or draws and never called my sets. Pretty sure i had 25 sets and 2/3 of them were called with better hands, everything else was folded to me. I take the same line with other hands and they stack off with top pair no kicker or worse.

Also the usual big pairs run into aces, kings run into aces and aces running into sets.

I def made some mistakes adjusting early when i would 3bet light (a lot) because it worked so well in 25nl, but after i settled down the bleed kept going.

Dropping down, but where did i go so so very wrong Thanks for any advice guys!

Blinds: Thanks I checked these out. First thing I noticed that I was pretty surprised to see is that I have NEVER cold called from the SB or BB at 25nl FR (Is this bad? I assume its my lack of faith playing OOP that makes me 3b or fold in these spots). I seem to be pretty profitable in my resteal attempts (winning at 220 BB/100) when I 3b from SB or BB. Where I seem to lose money is when I go to far with marginal hands postflop (usually after limping with previous limpers and flopping a drawy hand).


Button and CO: I seem to play terribly postflop after a steal attempt. With saw flop not checked I win at around 22 bb/100 with Raised first in checked from CO + Button. However, when I click saw flop I have actually lost money.

This pretty much confirms what I felt was a major leak in my game... my post flop ability is very bad. Is there any suggested readings you would have for someone who pay is passable pre-flop, but needs serious work post flop?

Thanks again, this really helped out so far. I think that knowing how bad I've been playing post-flop will really help my game even before I do any further reading.

Very helpful, thanks. I think this might be the single biggest area of my game that needs work. I probably go into check-call mode far more often than I should. It does enable me to catch people betting the river with missed draws and marginal hands, but I'm likely giving up a decent amount of value in the process.

I led you astray in my post, and I apologize. In PT3, it is impossible to "cold call" a raise from the blinds, because you have already put money in the pot before the raiser raises. PT3 treats calls from the blinds as limp/calls.

HEM ignores this and treats a call from the blinds like a cold call.

To check your calls from the blinds, you have to click the "called a raise" box on the actions tab, not the "cold called" box. Re-do your filter for calls from the blinds this way, and you will get a number > 0.

For your other leaks, especially the post flop ones, study the concepts of the week threads that relate to post flop play.

Thanks, that makes a lot more sense. I've started reading through the old COTW and I think they have started to help me. I'm planning to keep working at this over the next few weeks and see if I can start winning more consistently in cash games.

I can't quite figure out why I'm having such a hard time at 50nl. My stats are basically the same, I would think that would allow me to be at least a marginal winner at 50nl. Any ideas?

thank you for the insight mpethy. i sometimes play a solid nit style, sometimes TAG and others LAG. overall my winrate at 25nl is about 5bb/100 after 85k hands. is this low? i would like to think i have the skills to become one of the top winning players at 25nl (brag?), so what's a good winrate to shoot for? i try to adjust to how tables are playing and don't go into particular sessions intending to play a certain style. thanks for any input!

Hello all. I think this is my first posts here so I hope I am posting this info/question in the right thread. Forgive me if put it in the wrong place...
I am a consistenly losing player. I dont exactly know why? I have read books and try to apply the theory they mention, and it works sometimes, but over the long run, I always have a negative return. I dont know exactly what I am doing wrong...? I downloaded PT3 in hopes of figuring out some leaks bc I know I have a ton! I dont really know how to interpret the info that I get from it just yet. I mean, I know what it all means, but I dont know how to read it, then understand what my leaks are from the information that it gathers about me. Any help would be useful and much appreciated. I dont know if this is a reasonable sample size or not, but this is just from the last day or two. That is all I have had PT3. Thanks in advance for taking the time to help me out... If you guys need more pics/info, let me know what tabs I should be showing...

Can you post your positional stats and wr? I think I know what the scoop is but want to see things by position first.

25nl:




50nl:

What's a reasonable River Cbet% and River Cbet success % in HEM? I just reviewed a HEM database with a River Cbet% of 80 and a River Cbet success % of 50, and the player had a red line that was break even despite his blind play, blind stealing, 3bet re-stealing, 3betting, Flop and Turn stats indicating the usual downward sloping red line of uNL players. Is it possible that a super aggro River Cbet% can single handedly make a red line break even regardless of the other leaks in his Non Showdown Winnings?

I've never come across such a high River Cbet% and River Cbet Success % in about 60 databases so far, so I'd appreciate some feedback. My understanding is that it should be appr. 40% and 50% respectively.

Look at your loss rate from the blinds, you are getting killed at 50NL relative to 25NL there.

Here are my stats filtered for just SB and BB. I still don't see what I'm doing wrong.

My river c-bet is exactly 80% and my river c-bet success rate is exactly 50%.

Have you hacked into my DB?

truthfully, I do not think that your player's stats in this regard are that out of line. He's not playing as super aggro on the river as you think he is. I rather think he is taking lines that are allowing him to bet the river with a somewhat higher frequency than the bet flop/bet turn/check river crowd.

I'm not following, the stats you originally posted say the same thing as the ones in this post. Your winrate at 50NL from the blinds is half of your winrate at 25NL from the blinds. Your 3bet numbers have dropped 22%. You've also tightened up in the blinds considerably.