If you are a regular reader of our blog, you are likely aware of how essential poker software is to your development as a poker player. Among many programs, tracking software is the best poker tool you can start with. Not only does it provide you with the poker HUD or information about how other people play, but it also allows you to find leaks in your own game.
Tracking software is more potent than many people realize
Most players associate programs like Poker Tracker or Holdem Manager (or any tracker, as they are referred to) with the poker HUDs (heads up displays). It’s understandable, as it’s the most visual and widely discussed aspect of every tracking software. What is often missed by the wider public is that the biggest strength of every tracker is its database.
Before becoming a game-changing tool, such a database needs a lot of time to grow, though. For the very first days or weeks of your use of poker tracking programs, the database you’ve collected will be nearly useless. The reason is simple, and it’s called a sample size.
The sample size is an aspect that validates whether any data in poker is trustworthy or not. The larger your relevant information sample is, the more value it has. For inexperienced users, it’s very easy to misinterpret the stats provided by the HUD. The most common example is to take a solid player who’s being dealt great starting hands for a maniac opening every other hand when it’s just a hot streak. Disregarding the importance of the sample size is a straightforward path to a losing poker strategy.
Before you make any significant adjustments, you have to give your poker tracking software some time to collect a database
How much time are we talking about? There’s no arbitrary value, but the correlation is simple: the more online poker you play, the faster your database will grow and the more valuable insight it provides.
So how should you approach the data provided by a poker HUD while your database is small? You can ignore it until you have collected dozens of hands on a player. Of course, if you are paying attention to what is going on at your poker table, you’ll be able to correctly assess what type of player you are playing against, but generally speaking, you should take the stats with a grain of salt until you have played about hundred or so hands against any given opponent.
Luckily, the most used information variables, like VPIP (Voluntary Put $ Into The Pot), PFR (Pre-Flop Raise), and 3B (3-bet), start to become reliable quite fast, as the actions they describe are the most common.
The situation is more complicated with advanced statistics like 4B (4-bet) or fold to a river c-bet, for example. The actions they refer to are rarer, and you may need to collect even a few thousand hands against a particular player to gather a reliable sample size.
Your choice of poker game influences the importance of tracking software
Unfortunately for tournament players, they can squeeze the least out of the poker hands they’ve played. The reason is simple; tournaments have a few different phases, and the strategy is different for the early stage and later stages when the ICM (independent chip model) is involved, and stacks are more shallow. Every tournament player should be aware that most hands are played under somewhat unique conditions and consider that when they want to make a decision based on the HUD stats.
Of course, certain HUD filters will help, but online poker players should generally not overvalue the importance of their tracking software while playing.
The situation is different for the fans of cash games and Spins. Though distinct from the technical standpoint, these formats have one big similarity – almost all hands are played in repetitive circumstances. Traditionally, most cash game hands at any online poker table are played on more or less 100BB deep. Of course, sometimes you get very deep-stacked, but you rarely play against other deep stacks, so you can focus on studying one stack’s depth.
It is similar in Spins. You start with the 25BB, and a vast majority of hands are played on smaller stack sizes. The stacks shrink quickly, but the circumstances stay more or less the same most of the time – three or two players and one prize.
In both formats, that results in one thing: it allows you to quickly gather many hands played under similar conditions. And that’s what useful databases are made of.
A broad database will help you a lot in an online poker environment
Over a month or two of playing at the same stakes of cash games (or Spins), you’ll gather hundreds of hand histories with the same players. Such hands will help you get a better feel for what the population on your stakes is most likely to do.
How often do they c-bet? How often do they fold to a c-bet? How do they play in 3 bet pots?
You’ll be able to nail these questions with the collected data. But that’s not all. Poker tracking software will also allow you to analyze the game of particular opponents with whom you’ve played a lot. You’ll most likely need to gather a few thousand hands on a player you’re interested in, but the effort will be worth it.
With such data, you’ll be able to take a closer look at the best players at your stakes. Which stats characterizing their play are different from yours? At which spots do they win the most money? How do they play against the recreational players? These are only a few areas worth analyzing.
Database poker tools will also help you while playing Spins
Everything we’ve mentioned above is also true for the Spins. Due to the game being played at only three positions, you’ll be able to gather more data on your opponents. In this case, more data translates into even more valuable insights, as you’ll be able to characterize what your opponents are doing right or wrong faster and with higher accuracy.
We can’t deny that you need a lot of knowledge to fully utilize the output of Holdem Manager or Poker Tracker. Don’t worry, though; we’re here to help. Our coaches are among the most experienced Spin & Go players in the world, and the database analysis has no secrets from them.
Join Smart Spin and take advantage of that!
Even if you’re not ready to analyze your opponents’ play in detail, you can search for leaks in your own game
In fact, if you have no prior experience with the poker software mentioned in this article, that’s the first thing you should do. Where to start?
The first thing you should check is your win rate sorted by positions. It should grow linearly, with the big blind being your weakest position and the button being the strongest. Remember that your basic win rates on the big blind and small blind are respectively -100/100 (BB/hands) and -50/100 (BB/hands). The reason being: if you would never willingly put any money into the pot while being on the big blind, you would lose 1BB every time, hence as a result, you would lose 100 big blinds over 100 hands. It works similarly for a small blind.
So, your goal on the blinds is to lose less than you would if you never put any more money into the pot. On the other positions, the situation is more straightforward; you should have a positive win rate on each of them, as you are not forced to put any money in. The lowest win rate should occur on the UTG and the highest on the button.
If your win rate does not grow with the subsequent positions, it’s possible that you misplayed some of the hands. And that’s the second thing you should look into; checking the win rates of specific hands. Every tracking software lets you see how much you win with specific hands. Moreover, you can filter the hands by particular holdings and positions, resulting in precise data.
That’s only the tip of the iceberg of the poker software world
In this article, we’ve barely scratched the surface of the HUD software’s usefulness. It takes a lot of time to master it fully, but as long as almost all major poker sites allow such tools, it is unwise not to take advantage of them.
We’re aware of that, which is why we strongly emphasize the correct usage of tracking software to our students. As a result, the poker community we’ve created over the years is home to the best players on all Spin & Go stakes.