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visit MIT OpenCourseWare at ocw.mit.edu. PROFESSOR: Welcome back everyone
to Poker Theory and Analytics. We're lucky today to have a
guest speaker, Joel Freed, coming to talk to us
about PokerTracker. As you know, we have
a great partnership going with PokerTracker
in this class. They sent along Joel Freed
to teach us analytics. Joel is a VIP support director
for Max Value Software, who's the parent company
of PokerTracker. He has taught
analytical techniques to some of the biggest
names in the poker industry. And he's come by to teach
us that sort of thing, also. So with that, I'm going
to pass it along to Joel. JOEL FREED: Thanks. I hope you all have had a chance
to install PokerTracker by now. PokerTracker is the
industry leading analysis and tracking software
for online poker players. We've been around since 2001. So we've been able to grow as
the poker economy has grown. It started out as
software only for people who played limit hold 'em. And it has exploded. We do Omaha now-- obviously,
no-limit and pot limit hold 'em. And we have extensive tournament
support, some of which we'll be talking about today. What PokerTracker does is it can
help you identify and analyze similar decision points to
help you improve your game. So PokerTracker's not
going to do it all for you, but it's going to help you find
the spots where you can improve and make better decisions. So what do I mean when
I say, decision point? A decision point is
any time in a hand where you can make some action. So you can check. You can bet. You can call. You can raise. Or, you can fold. At any point in the hand
where you can do that, I'm going to call
that a decision point. And when you play poker, after
you've played for a while, or if you've already
played for a while, you'll realize you naturally
remember similar decision points. If you're the short
stack in a tournament, and it's folded to you
and the small blind, you're going to be able to lump
all of those kinds of decisions together so that, when you face
that decision the next time around, you already have some
kind of history to build on. And using PokerTracker
to analyze the interesting decision points
is really a very effective way to improve your game
because, the next time you come to a similar
decision, you will already have some memory of
what you believed to be right last time you were
doing something like this. So what makes a decision
point interesting? It's interesting when you aren't
sure what the right answer is. And that may seem
kind of obvious. But when the expectation
of the outcomes is really close together, you're
going to sit at the table, and you're going
to agonize over it. And that's where you see
people on television, where they're sitting there for
minutes, and they're going, ah, I don't know what to do. And those are the
interesting decision points. And as you start out, you will
find that you really don't know what you're doing a lot. All decision points are
going to be interesting until you start to have
some kind of heuristic, some kind of rubric for
when to call, when to fold. So here is a situation. We are in the big blind. It's 100/200 blinds. This is a tournament. In this tournament, it was
a single table tournament. Let's say you bought in for $10. $50 goes to first place,
$30 goes to second place, and $20 goes to third place. So there's four
players left here. You have a chip
stack of 1,430 chips. And the cutoff
here, this player, opened all in for 5,700 chips. The player on the button folded. And this player called
for 2,980 chips. So these two guys
are already all in. You have ace, queen of clubs. So you're ace, queen suited. And you have 1,430
chips back in this spot. I want you to take a second. And I want you to think
about this decision and, whether in this spot,
knowing nothing about these two players, you don't really know
too much about them right now, we'll get into that
a little bit later. But without knowing anything
really about these guys, they're just your average
players in the game, would you be calling or folding? I want you to think
about that for a second. So I'll point out
another feature here. For those of you who are
familiar with pot odds. Your odds here are
3.35 to 1 to call. If this was a cash
game and if you had 23% equity against
both of those hands, you could call profitably. Obviously, this is a tournament
situation which affects things drastically right here. So the total pot size is 4,810. We have 1,430 to call. So if you believe that this
is a very easy decision, raise your hand. One, two-- we've got a few. Awesome. You guys are right. If you think it's a call, I
want you to raise your hand. One call. For the people think it's
close, if you think it's a call, raise your hand. One, two. Got a few. It's not even close. And it's fold. Let me talk a little bit about
what's going on in this view. This is from our ICM quiz. PokerTracker has a
feature that lets you practice in these end of
tournament situations, which you can access through the Tools
menu bar-- Tools, ICM, Quiz. And in this spot, what it's
telling you is, if you push, based on an average player
model for these two players, your equity in the
tournament is 9.49% based on the expectation of this
hand against these two players when they're all in,
for average opponents. That means that you could expect
to make $9.49 with the prize we've picked out. If you fold, however, you
have an expectation of 18.67% And the reason for
this is that it's reasonably likely that the
player with 2,980 chips is going to go out. And once you do that, you
are guaranteed third place. So this is a clear fold. It's even, in fact, a clear
fold if you have kings. And you can go further in
the poker tracker ICM tool. If you click the Results
link that's right here, it will bring up the
full math, and I'm not going to go through the
ICM math right now for you. I know you're going
to go through that later in the course. But what you can do is you
can change their ranges, right here, by clicking these buttons. And so I've set
them to 100% range. That means these players
are playing any two cards. So even if you knew before the
hand, they pushed all in blind, they didn't even
look at their hands, they could have any two
cards, either one of them, it's still a fold because fold
equity still is close to 19%, and your push equity is
15%, even though you're going to win half of all hands
against two random cards. So before we talk
a little bit more about how to use PokerTracker
to analyze your game and see where you
can improve, I wanted to talk a little
bit about how you can use PokerTracker and not
get better poker because there's some great and interesting
stuff in PokerTracker that you can spend
lots of time looking at that will not help you at
all make a better decision. So looking at graphs. People love looking at
their results graphs. And here's a nice results graph. You started off at hand one. You had a nice run here. You went steady
for a little while. You won a few big hands
around hand 183,000. And then you end up
about plus 860,000 Euros. Since poker is a series
of decision points, the question is, which decisions
would you make differently based on this graph. And the answer is
absolutely none of them. Knowing that you did
this well in this spot is not going to help you make
better decisions in the future. It may allow you to buy a
house in the Boston area, but it will not help you
actually play better poker. Another way you will
not get better at poker by using PokerTracker is by
looking at hands, which we call walks. A walk is when you're in the
big blind and everyone folds to you. You win the small
blind, which is nice. But you didn't do anything. There's no way in which
you could make a better play in that hand. And I know a lot
of heads up, sit and go players who play
two player tournaments like to look at those kinds of
spots and they want to know, how much am I winning there. And the answer is
it doesn't matter because you can't change your
play based on who folds to you. Another thing that people
want to do with PokerTracker that won't help them get better
at poker is analyzing luck. We have several tools
for luck in PokerTracker. This graph is from
the cash game side. It is actually-- you'll
notice the normal curve. This is actually normalized. So what you're seeing
here is each dot tells you how often you're
hitting your draws relative to expectations. So this player is more
than one standard deviation above the mean at flopping
three of a kind when he holds a pocket pair,
which we call flopping a set. And that's fantastic. He's probably
making lots of money when he has these pocket
pairs because making a set is a very powerful hand. However, he's not going
to be able to change the way he plays by knowing
that he's been lucky in the past because he may or
may not continue to be lucky in the future. I also have a friend who
spent lots of time building lots of reports to see if he
was getting dealt aces more regularly than average. And while it's great
to be dealt aces more regularly than average--
and you will make lots more money if you get dealt aces
more regularly than average-- knowing what happened last week
will not help you the next time you're sitting at
the poker table. The last thing I'm going to say
about PokerTracker-- and this is a little bit trickier--
there are lots of statistics, and lots of numbers
in PokerTracker. I think that we have easily
over 1,000 different statistics you can look at, especially
when you consider combinations of position. And if you add stack size,
it's in the thousands for sure. And the problem is, some are
not relevant to the spot you're looking at. And some will lack
a sufficient sample. So I'm going to use
this hand to illustrate both of those points. This is a cash game hand
from a from real poker site from about four years ago. The player, hero,
here was on the button and was dealt ace of
spades, 10 of hearts. So he had ace, 10 off suit. Before the flop,
villain16 made a raise. And hero called. The flop was two of
spades , four of spades, three of diamonds. villain16 made a bet. And hero made a call. I'm not going to go into whether
or not that was a good play. There are reasons for it. There are reasons against it. But for the purposes
of this hand, it's important to note
that that happened. On the turn, villain16 also
bet, and hero also called. The turn was the 10 of
diamonds and the river was the ace of hearts. So now, we have two pair--
top two pair in fact. And villain16 makes another bet. The bet was 1,550
British pounds. And the pot was 1,975 pounds. So we're sitting here. We're getting 2.27 to 1 odds. So if we call and we're ahead
31% of the time or more, it's a good call. We can fold. Our stack is 3,350, so we
could also make a raise to like 1,700, 1,800. Now we have lots of
stats here on the table. I'm not going to go
through them all. This is our heads up display. So we're looking, right now,
at the PokerTracker replayer. The important ones to
note for this purpose is this red number
here-- this 97-- this is the number of hands of
data we have on this player. So if you were
sitting at a casino, you get about 30
hands an hour, so this would be the equivalent
of about three hours of live play against somebody. Online, it's more like
an hour and a half because online hands tend
to come a bit faster. So we've got some data. It's not a huge sample. VP is the VPIP number that
was talked about last time. That's the percentage
of hands he's playing. So he's been playing
about 2 out of 3 hands. So he's been in a lot of pots. So we know that about this guy. And PR is Preflop Raise. That's how often he's
coming in for a raise, or raising at some
point in the hand. And that's 45%. So 2/3 of the time--
because 45 over 65 is 2/3, roughly--
he's making raises. So he's aggressive and
he's playing lots of hands. And here we're in this spot. We're facing a big
bet on the river. So we've got his river stats. So if you click
on the HUD, you're going to get this pop-up. There's a bunch of tabs here,
Tools, Preflop, Flop, Turn, River. Since this is a river spot, I've
just got the River tab open. I didn't want to
overwhelm you guys yet. And we can see his bet stats. So on the river, in
our entire sample, he's had eight chances
to bet the river. And he bet three
of those chances. And I'm going to tell you
that that number is completely and totally irrelevant
to this situation because we can also see
this number for cbet. Now cbet is a poker term. Is called a continuation bet. That means that a player has
been aggressive the entire hand up till now. So a cbet on the flop, he
was the last raiser preflop. He gets a chance to open the
action on the flop and he does. That's a flop continuation. A turn continuation bet--
he made a flop cbet, and he now has a chance
to bet on the turn, he makes a turn bet. So that's a turn cbet. A river cbet is he
makes a turn cbet. And now he has a chance
to bet the river. And we have never, not
once, seen him get a chance to make a river cbet. So if we tried to use this
38% here, and we said, well, he only bets
38% of the river, so he must have a
really big hand here, we would be basing it
on wrong information because he could have gotten
to the river in any way for these bets to count. He could have been
calling-- a calling down in position, and then
it was checked to him, and that that would count. He could've been raising. He could've raised
preflop, checked the flop, checked the turn. That would count. Any combination. And his hand strength
is going to be vastly different
those times he is bet the entire way
than those times where he's done other things. So since we have a sample
of zero cbets here, these river stats
are not actually that useful for
analyzing this spot. You're much better off
looking at the board and trying to figure
out, based on his preflop numbers and his flop numbers,
what kind of hand gets here. I could talk about
this hand a lot more, but that's our PowerPoint here. Now we've talked about ways
that you can not get better at poker using PokerTracker. Let's get to the
interesting stuff. How do you get better at
poker using PokerTracker 4? And I'm going to say
it's a five step process. Step one, use
PokerTracker for reports and filters to look at very
specific kinds of decision points. Find those times you
find interesting. Find those times where
you don't know the answer, and those are the
ones we're going to look-- you should be
looking at because those are ones that are going to
help you get better at poker. The next thing to do is create
mental models of the players in a specific situation. So that means you should have
an idea of what you think those players are doing here. Now even though they're looking
at similar kinds of decision points, you're not always
going to have similar kinds of players in those hands. If you want to look at all
times you were facing a river continuation bet, you're
going to have sometimes you're against aggressive players
and sometimes you're against passive players. You're going to have times where
the river made a draw come in. You're going to have times where
the river paired the board. All these are
slightly different. And not necessarily
different enough-- you wouldn't want to lump
them together for point 1, but enough that you
need to definitely think about the players in
this specific situation and try to get an idea what's
this player doing right here. This is exactly what you
would do at a live table when you're sitting
across the table from somebody trying to
figure out what is going through his mind right now. Then you adjust that
model that you've just built based on any relevant
statistics that you do happen to have-- if you have
notes on the player or anything else. If you know that this guy
lost a big hand two hands ago, and he might be, what's called
in the poker world, steaming. He is really mad. And he is just going to be
way more aggressive right now, that's relevant information. If you're sitting
in a casino and you know that guy has just
finished his fifth bear and he's slurring his
words a little bit, that's relevant information. Anything that you can do to
adjust the model that you've built to be more
relevant, that's good. Then you evaluate your
different decision options. So if you're in a
spot where, let's say, you can just either
call or fold. You have to think about what
kind of hand does he have. Will I win if I
make a call here? If I fold, obviously,
I'm out of the hand. For tournaments, what chip
stack will I have remaining? How does this affect
everyone else's standings in the tournament? There's a lot of considerations
for tournaments that affect, especially, your
preflop decisions. And then, once you've done
all four of these things, go to step one and do it again. Continue to do this
over and over again, every time you have an
interesting kind of decision, and you will find that you are
able to make better decisions because you understand the
different decision points that you're facing. So let's talk about
how to navigate PokerTracker 4 a little bit. For those of you who
have it installed and have your
computer here, feel free to open up PokerTracker
and follow along with me. So what I'm calling a
report is any kind of way in which PokerTracker
is showing you data. On the top left
here, this community, which launches our
community page, you can look at our forums. You can download custom stats,
all sorts of other fun stuff. Play Poker. This is where you go when
you want to actually play. So for those of you
who haven't actually done any importing in
any of the tournaments yet, when you want to
play, you go to Play Poker and you click the Gets
Hands While Playing button. And View Stats here,. This is where all
of your information is going to be displayed. T is for tournament,
which is going to be all you guys are interested in. And we have four options,
Result, Statistics, My Reports, and Graphs. And I'm not going to
talk about Graphs today at all just because there
really isn't enough time. So there's this left
hand side bar here. And some people
have liked closing it to make things bigger. And you should not
forget that it is there. A lot of the navigation
options are in that sidebar. And there is a huge
amount of value in being able to change reports. So right now, we're looking
at the overview report. It's got a nice graph. You can change different
kinds of graphs. You can show your ROI, your ITM. ROI is Return On Investment. ITM is In The Money percentage. You can show those
on this graph, too. You can see your
results-- how much you've won, how many
tournaments you've played. And down here-- so
this is a report. Right now, we're looking
at the basic By Description report, which is showing
you one row per description of tournament type. For you guys, honestly, just
looking at By Tournament is probably going to be OK. That will give you one row
per individual tournament. You're not going to
have so much data that it's going to be hard
to group things together. And most of your tournaments
are relatively similar. If you choose Advanced rather
than Basic, all it does is give you more stats. So you might want to
spend some time looking at what these numbers
mean in Basic before you flip to Advanced. And it's also important to
know-- so you can change any report from this drop down. And I'll talk about what
the different ones are in a little bit. But the Overview Report
has one really cool feature that is not obvious, and
that is you can double click to get more detail. So if you want to know more
about these 392 tournaments because those are
the ones you're going to start playing
tomorrow and those are the ones that are
really interesting, then you double click. And now you see each one
of those 392 tournaments, one tournament per row. And you get to see
how much you won in that tournament, how
long it was, your finish position, all kinds of stuff. And it does say
here on the side, double click a row
for more details. And you can go back by
choosing Back By Description or choosing Remove All
filters and Return to Route. If that's not enough,
you can then double click the individual
tournament and it will show you the hands,
one hand at a time. So you're going to get
a row for each hand as the tournament went through. It will show you most
recent 100 by default. If the tournament
ran more than 100, you can feel free
to change that. We just have that set
so that it doesn't choke too hard if you have
a 1,500 hand tournament or something. You can also sort by clicking
any of the column headers, just like any other
reporting software. So you've got one
row per line here. You can also right click, which
has a lot of useful features. It's a context menu. And you can use that to
add or remove statistics from your report. So when you get into
your VPIP and your PFR and those kinds of
things, you might want to add or remove a bunch
of different custom stats. So you can do that with
Configure Report here. But you can also replay-- this
is how you'd replay hands. If you want to export videos and
put them on YouTube directly, you could just right
click, choose Export Video, put it on YouTube, post
YouTube video on Facebook, and everyone can see
your awesome play, which is always fun. And if you want to look
at multiples at a time, you can use Control
or Shift-Click. So Control-Click will
highlight one extra individual, and Shift-Click will
highlight a range. If you click here, you
hold shift, you click here, it'll highlight
everything in between. And then you could
say replay hand. You could say replay
all hands and report. And it will load everything
up in the replayer. This would be the
way, if you wanted to replay an entire tournament. You had such a great
tournament, you really want to watch it again,
right now, you can just replay all hands and report. And presto. You can just click
Play and sit back. And the whole tournament
will play through. So another report on
the statistics side that I wanted to highlight
for you is summary. And the reason summary
is interesting and useful is that summary allows you to
do different kinds of grouping. In particular, for you, I
think starting hands hold 'em, as shown here on the
right, and position will be your most useful ones. So what happens in starting
hand hold 'em here, you have one row per hand type. So you can see here,
we had aces 131 times. This is how many big
blinds we won, adjusted for luck-- for all in equity. The VPIP is 100%. Congratulations, if
you did not know it, you will almost
certainly, voluntarily put money in the pot 100% of the
time when you get dealt aces. If this number is
not 100% of the time, I recommend going back and
rethinking your decision process, because aces is
the best hand in Texas hold 'em, for certain. And nobody will say
anything else about that. You can see different rows
for all the different types. And that is going
to be the best way to see-- if you feel
like I'm playing some of these suited connectors
a little-- maybe it's too much. Maybe I'm not sure. Am I playing jack,
ten suited too much? Am I playing king,
queen off suit too much? If you're not sure,
come here and you can start looking at the
hands because whatever row you have here, the
hands from that row will display in the bottom. And it works just like
the other hand report. You can replay them. You can double click for
more information on one. They're all right here. And Position and Groups. I don't have an image of it, but
it groups one row for position. And when I say position, I mean
if you're in the big blind, if you're in the small blind,
if you're on the button. So if you feel like someone
is beating up on my big blind. Man, I sit there, and every
time I get my blinds raised, and I have to fold,
and I hate it. Can I play back? Or am I doing it right, and
it just feels wrong to me because sometimes your
memory of the situation isn't really the truth. You can come in and load
up the Position Report, and you'll be able to see
exactly what's happening. Another really awesome report
is the Hold 'em Hand Range Visualizer. This is in Statistics as well. And it looks like a lot, but
it's not actually as crazy as it looks. So first off, over here, we have
various different statistics. So when you choose
a statistic, you're getting information based
on your values in this spot. So let me talk about
what three betting is. Three betting means someone
has made a first raise. That's the two bet. And then you made
the second raise. And we're talking about
preflop only right now. So you made the three-bet. So someone raised
and you reraised. That's all we know about
these hands right now. But we're looking at only
those spots, right now, in this report. And you can look at all
kinds of different spots. And this little wrench
here lets you configure. If you want to put
different stats here, you can do that, too. Right now, we're
looking at range. So here it says,
Range and Value. So when I say range, I mean
these are the hands that you have actually done this with. These numbers here
are percentages. And each one tells
you what percentage of all of the hands that I
have made a three-bet with does this comprise. Let's look at pocket 10s. This player made a
reraise with pocket 10s-- of hands he made a
reraise, 2.244% of those, he had pocket 10s. So you can think about this
as, if I made this raise, and someone else was against me,
what could they expect to see. About almost 4% of
the time, they'd expect to see ace,
queen offsuit. 4.28% of the time, they'd
expect to see ace, king. 2 and 1/2% of the time, aces. So this is what your
actual range looks like. And in poker, we use
range as the term for-- if you think of the
domain as all hole cards-- so those are all hole cards
you could be playing-- your heuristics, your mental
processes at playing poker is the function that takes
a hand from the domain and puts it in the range. So this is your range. You can change this
from Range to Value. And this is where it gets cool. This is the percentage
that this player made a three bet, given
that he had a chance to with each of these hands. And so you're going to notice
something very different, right away. We have a whole lot
of the 100s here. This player has made a three
bet 100% with ace king suited, ace queen suited, ace jack
suited, ace 10, and ace nine suited. Every time he had those
hands, and he had a chance to make a reraise, he did it. Every single time. But if you look at the
actual percentages, they are not the same. 0.84, 0.931, 1.49. So you can tell also that he
got dealt ace, jack suited in these kinds of
spots a little bit more because he's still doing
it 100% of the time. So this report is fantastic
for helping you figure out, first of all, what would an
opponent be seeing me do. What am I looking like? And then, well, what am
I actually doing when I get my hands in these spots? If you think, you know what, I
should never be making reraises with king, jack offsuit. And you come here,
and you go, well, I've been doing it 75% of the time,
you immediately know something that you can use next
time you have king, jack offsuit in that situation
to make a different play. That will let you
change your poker. And again, you can pick any
of our statistics from here. And you can look at them. Anything that shows
percentage-wise will work in this report. Another really important
report for tournament play in particular is
facing preflop action. So again, we're in
Statistics section, and it's the Facing
Preflop Action Report. What you're seeing here is
one row per kind of situation that you could be in your very
first action before the flop. You get dealt your cards,
stuff happens before you. And now it's your
first decision. Well, the question is,
what happened until then. If it's an unopened pot, that
means everybody folded to you. So it's a similar
kind of situation. So here, we can see we
have 10,434 hands where this player was the first
to be able to open the pot. You can see the
winning percentage, you can see their VPIP and PFRs. So again, they're playing
a little more than 70% of hands in that spot,
raising 60%-- a little more. But you can see one limper. Now a limper means someone
just called the big blind. It's a technical term. It means there's one person
who just called the big blind. And it's to them. We have 1,945 hands for that. You can see how
their VPIP changes. Suddenly, they're not putting
in nearly as much money. Part of the reason for
this is this sample is based on heads up play. So when you check
in the big blind, it's not considered voluntarily
putting money in because you haven't put any more money in. And you can only
VPIP before the flop. After the flop is a
totally different animal. So VPIP preflop only. And that's a good
thing to keep in mind. So that's why you see
this kind of big drop. But you can already see
how, looking at this report, I can tell you something
about this player's play. They check a lot when
it's limped to them, and they're in the big
blind, and its heads up play. So you can use these and,
of course, this works like the other reports. And all of your
hands are down here. And so you can
replay these hands. You can do other filtering
in addition to this. And it will help
you figure out what your play is in different
first situation spots. And tournament
play-- this is going to be huge because, when you're
facing an all in before you get a chance to act, your range
is going to be very different, you're going to want to make
different decisions than you will if everyone folds
to you because you're able to steal the blinds
a lot more liberally. And you're going to see,
later in the course, how aggressive you
can actually be as your chip stack gets small. So being able to look at
these different kinds of spots will help you fine
tune your game and look at what you've actually
been doing in those situations. So I've mentioned
lots of reports. Do you need more than that? I'm glad you do because you can
create custom reports in the My Reports section. In here, you can choose the
type of report, how to group the report, and how to show
exactly what you want to see. So any of our stats can
be added to these reports. There's three kinds. A player report starts
out by looking at hands that you've played. You're looking at
groups of hands. So a stat like VPIP
looks at groups of hands because it's a how
often you voluntarily put money in the pot
over a sample of hands. That's to contrast with a
Hand Report, which is going to show you one row per hand. So if you wanted to
make a report that was going to show you all
hands where you faced a river continuation bet, you could
do that as a hand report, and save it, and load that
up really quickly next time. An All Players Report,
is like a Player Report, except it's not
just for you, it's for everybody in your database. You're going to get
one row per player. And you can put whatever
stats you want on it there. For Player Report, we also have
lots of different groupings, some of which you will not
see anywhere else by default in PokerTracker. And I want to specifically
highlight preflop stack size for you guys because,
as tournament players, this kind of custom
report has a lot of value for you because preflop
stack size is going to be the determining factor
in a lot of situations in your tournament play. So let's see what that
report looks like. You get one row per
different stacks. You get different ranges. These are in big blinds. They're not in m. You get a pretty
nice nice range. And you can kind
of approximate m by multiplying that
by 2/3 because you're going to be dividing it
by the small blind, too. So you can see here,
this player had the stack less than two
big blinds 59 times. And this is how
often they raised when it was folded to them. And you can see it's 47%. So you can see, in this
spot, how someone's raising range is going to change
based on their stack size. And you can see we have
different samples for all the different stack sizes. Based on the tournaments you
guys are actually playing, you're going to be seeing
numbers much more in this area, and a lot less in
this area because you need to be really,
really deep to be able to have 100 big blinds. And in the turbo
tournament, it just really doesn't happen that much. But, in addition to be
able to just look at this, you can then come in
here to this blue Filters link-- it will be blue for you
until you've clicked it once. It's gray for me here. And then you can make
individual filters, and you can save that
with this report. So you could come
in here, and you could take this report,
and filter for times you're facing an all in. And you would then see times you
were facing an all in by stack size, and see what
your stats are. And you could save that. And it would show
up in this dropdown. And you could look at it later. And you wouldn't need
to redo everything. And it will be really helpful
for analyzing your own play. So I've talked a lot about
filtering-- how do you do that. This button here,
More Filters, is the gateway to all of
the filtering everywhere. And other than the
doing specific stuff for custom reports,
this is the place where you're going
to go if you want see specific subsets of your data. So when you click it, you're
going to get this window. There are five sections over
here, Game Details, Hand Details, Hand Values,
Board Texture, and Actions and Opportunities. And each one of these has
different kinds of filters. And we tried to break it down
as intuitively as possible. So Game Details is
all stuff for how to filter out the game level. What day did I play it on;
what currency was it in; what was the speed;
was it a turbo; was it as a hyper turbo;
was it a super turbo; what was the buy in; what
was its description; what was the table size; were
there six players at a table-- 10 players at the table. You can also filter for
the specific blind levels. So if you wanted to look
at a hand at the 100/200 blind levels, that
would be there. You navigate this by--
you choose your section on the left hand side. Anytime you see the greater
than symbol, you can click. So any of these options
here, you can click. And you'll get the
individual filters you can turn on and off. And I'll show you a
few of those later. When you go down, you
can click up here, where it says cancel, right now. It will change up to
the previous section. And when you turn
everything you want on, you click add to filters. And then it adds
them all together. Here's Hand Details. Hand Details is filters about
the whole hand altogether. So what was the maximum
preflop raise that occurred? Was there a three bet at all? If you want all hands where
someone made a three bet, you'd come here,
which can be great if you want to look
at times when you made a raise and someone
made a reraise, but you don't really care who. You just want to look
at all three-bet hands. You can come in here. If you want to look at hands
where there was limping, you can turn that on. If you want to look
at hands by pot size or stack depth-- so you
want to look at hands where you had a certain m. You can come in there. How many players
were at the table. If you want to look bubble
hands, you'd look there. What was the position
of different players? Who made the first raise? Where was I sitting? All that's in player position. This is mostly for
custom reports and notes. If you made tags
on the hand, you can tag hands in the
right-click menu. You can do that there. How much you won or lost
in the hand; how much you contributed to the pot;
did the hand go to showdown. There's tons of options. Hand Values is
another way you're going to want to look at hands. And that is your hole
cards, your hand strength, and your draw strength. So let's go through those. This is what the hole
card filtering looks like. You've got the chart of all the
different hole card options. So there are several
ways you could do it. If you want, you can just
click on individual hole cards. So if you just wanted to
pick, say, pocket 10s, you click right there, add
to filter, you're done. You only see data
from pocket 10s. If you wanted to see
the top 15% of hands, you can come down
to this slider, and you can slide
it over to 15%. My top 15% of hands and your top
15% of hands may be different. That's why we have
this Model option. So we're using, by default,
this Glanksky-Carlson model, which was invented
by them in response to a very specific math problem,
which I think you guys will talk about later in the course. We use that as the default
model to rank hands. But if you don't like that,
you can actually go in, and you make your
own custom model. You can say, you
know what, I want three, two suited to be
the best hand in the deck because I love it. You can do that. You can put that at the top. We also have hand versus three
randoms as a default model. It ranks hands based on
their equity against three random sets of hole cards. It's going to look
very different. It's going to be a lot more
skewed towards high cards. So you're going to
see things like king, jack offsuit and queen,
jack offsuit long before you see low pocket pairs. So that's going to make things
radically different in terms of using the percentages. There's also this
Group Select button, which will save you time. If you want to do
any ace, you can just click Group Select, Any Ace. Of if you wanted to do any
pair, Group Select, Any Pair. If you want to invert
it, you can just click Group Select and Invert,
and anything that's turned on will be turned off. So you have lots
of options there. Once you set whatever you want,
you just click Add to Filter. Hand Strength. So once you see the flop,
you have some hand strength. So all of these do imply
having some sort of hand. Did you have a high card? That means you
don't have any pair. You just look at what your
high card strength is. One pair, two pair,
three of a kind. All the way down. There are multiple, multiple,
options in each of these. I'm just going to
look at straight, just to save a little bit of time. So what you would pick is
what straight you made it on. So if you wanted to
look at only times you made the straight on the
river, you could pick that. If you wanted to
see any straight, if you wanted to see
all three straights, you can just change
that and turn it on, How many hole cards you used. If you wanted both
of your hole cars to be used to make
this straight, you can turn that on right here. A non-nut straight means it's
the best possible straight versus a better
straight could be made. So if you have ace, king, and
the board is queen, jack, 10, you have the nut straight. No one can have a
better straight. You have the absolute
best straight. If you have nine, eight
on that same board, you still have a straight,
8, 9, 10, jack, queen, but ace, king still is a
better straight than you. So you would have
the non-nut straight. Backdoor straight is when
you don't have a straight until the river. And you didn't have a straight
draw on the flop either. So if you had ace, jack,
with a king on the board, and it came queen, 10 to bust
some opponent on the bubble, you just completed
a backdoor straight and made somebody very unhappy. Draw Strength. So these are how you
would look at if you wanted to look at my straight
draws, my flush draw. You pick which
straight you had it on, which can be any flop, turn,
or both because you never have draws on the river. Your hand is made or not. And we have the different
kinds of draw options. So for straight
draws, you can have either draw to one card,
which makes you four outs, or draw to two cards,
which makes you eight out. And we let you pick here
whether the outs are the best possible straight or
outs to some straight that's not the best depending on
whether it's open ended or double gutshot. Also you could filter for
backdoor straight draw or hands where you didn't have
any straight draw ever. So you can imagine,
these can combine for lots of different things. Board Texture is how the
cards are working together on the flop. If you wanted to look
for a flop with any ace, you'd go into Board Cards, and
you could pick ace on the flop. If you wanted to look
for the turn paired the board with
the flop, you'd go into board pairing to the turn
section, and that one's there. If you wanted to look for times
the flop was all three clubs, so you want monotone, you
would go into board suits and you'd pick all three cards
of one suit for the flop. Board Connectedness
is like 10, 9 , 8 is considered
a connected flop. 10, 9, 7 is a little
less connected. So all those kinds of
options are in there. You can be really specific about
picking the situations you're filtering for. And Actions and Opportunity
is the last section. But in some ways, it's
almost the biggest because these are actions you
had, or opportunities you had, in hands you played. So this includes
bets and sizing, raises, raises faced,
raise sizing, calls, folds, opportunities, you name it. So we're going to
look at preflop just quickly so that
you get an idea. If you want to look at hands
where you voluntary put money in the pot, turn that on. Posted blinds, raises,
calls, folds, opportunities, all of these are here
to let you filter for times you made
a three-bet, times you faced a three-bet, times
you folded to a three-bet, times you had a chance
to face an all in-- that would be in opportunities. Action Sequences. Your specific action. So your first action is raising. Your second action is call. Let's bring those up. Bet Sizing. I want to look at times I made
a three big blind open raise. We can bring those up. Actions and Counter with Sizes. What someone else did
it and it came to me. So they made an open
raise of three big blinds and it came to me. That would be in there. And we have those for
flop, turn, and river, too. If that's not enough
and you need more stuff. You can combine these. So you can highlight them. So this is what it looks like
after you click Add to Filters. So we've added two. Sizes calculated in big blinds. Actions faced, two-bet
preflop between two and three. So that means that someone
made a two to three big blind open before the flop. And we faced that raise. That's that filter. And this is, we made
a first raise preflop with between two and
three big blinds. Now it should be obvious, these
will never happen together. So if you leave
these on with AND, and you click save and
apply to all filters, you will see no data anywhere
because that can never happen. What you might want,
however, is you want to see any of these two times. So you're looking
for hands where someone made that two
to three big blind open. I want to see how that affects
things on the turn, let's say, because those are the spots
I want to look at now. That's with the OR select. So you'd use OR. This is inclusive OR. So any of the times that match
either one of these two spots will come together. And when you click
that, it says OR. And you get the two
filters together. And you can also click
Ungroup, once things are grouped together. And you can split it back up. You can use AND if you want to
to make nested deeper logic. And NOT will negate things. So if you wanted to
look at-- if you wanted to negate times you made
a two-bet of that size, you could just click on
that one and click NOT. It's not highlighted
here because you can't NOT two things at once. And you would see all other
times, all other situations. So as you can imagine, making
a complicated situation is going to take you some time. And it's going to you little
work to get used to it. That's why we added this
Save As Quick Filter option. So once you've
made it, you don't have to make it again,
which is fantastic because if you spend half an
hour on one of these things, you don't want to click Clear
Filters and never see it again. So you just click Save As Quick
Filter, and type your Quick Filter name, and click OK. And then you're done. It is now saved for the future. You will see it on a
dropdown, which I'll show you in a couple of slides. And you will just be able
to load that right up on any of your reports, instantly. On the other side, we have
this Edit Quick Filters button. And when you click
that, it shows any saved Quick
Filters you have. When you click on it, it
shows you what they are. And you can rename
them, delete them. You can load them,
which is awesome when you have multiples. If you want to
put them together, you can load one and come over
here and load the other one. You can append them together. You can make several
pieces and then put them together really fast. We also have available for
free download on our website. Then you would import
them right here. If you wanted to export them
and give them to your friends-- you said, let's all make a
group of filters together. We'll split up the sample. And you make these, you
make these, I'll make these, and then you want to give
them all to each other, great. You just export them,
give them to each other, it saves you a
whole bunch of time. And this is the
dropdown in the sidebar. So you see, once we've
made this Quick Filter, you just pick it, click
that, and you're done. Now that filter applies
to all of the reports on the other side. So I've talked a
lot about stats. And I hope you're
sitting there wondering, what are these things. How can I find out
more about them? I want to know about it, but
there's so much going on. So the way these work is
the vast majority of stats in our software
will tell you what percentage of the time
somebody did something, given that he had a chance to. So it's this very simple
mathematical formula. How often did do
it, how often did he have a chance do it, turn
it into a percentage. Done. How often did he
actually three-bet divided by how often he
had a chance to three-bet. Multiply by 100. If it's 1% of the time when
he three bets, he has a hand. So let's go through
a few examples. VPIP, we've already
talked about a bunch. So it's the
percentage of the time a player chose to put
money in before the flop. This is considered one
of the staple stats because it really speaks
to how much a player is involved in the pot. If you've been sitting at
a casino and you see a guy that's just splashing
money every hand. He's playing every hand. He doesn't care. His VPIP is very high. And it's easier to
think about that player when you start building
models in your mind of what do players who have VPIPs do. And you can start to categorize
players by VPIP numbers. So someone who has
a VPIP of 40 is going to have similar kinds
of play style to someone else who has a VPIP
of 40, even if you don't know a whole lot else
because this one will converge pretty quickly since
they will VPIP or not pretty much every hand. Raise First In is a little
bit more restrictive, but I think it's one that's
really useful for you guys in tournament play. If the percentage
of time a player raises on their
first action, when everyone has folded to them. So if everyone folds
to you and you raise, you raised first in the pot. So if you see that
be 40% for somebody, they are raising a ton. They're raising almost
half of all hands. It's a huge number. And these can combine. These work together, right? So if someone has a VPIP of 70
and a Raise First In of two, they are calling all the time,
but they are not raising ever. So this starts to give you an
idea of what kind of player they are. They're the kind of
player who puts money in, but they are not willing
to commit to a raise. They don't want to
bring the stakes higher. They just want to go along
with whatever's happening. And some stats can be
super crazy specific. So we've already talked
about what three-bets are. We've already talked
about what cbets are. There is a stat in
our system called Fold To Raise After Flop Cbet
in a Three-bet or Higher Pot. That's what 3upplus means. Three-bet or higher. So let's break this one down. It means that we made
a three-bet or higher before the flop. That is, we either three-bet
or we four-bet or we fivr-bet, or we six-bet-- anything higher,
but we made the last raise because we made a
cbet on the flop. So we made some
last raise preflop that was at least a reraise. And on the flop, we
had a chance to bet, and we bet, and they raised
us-- because they raised-- and we folded to
that specific raise. You will not see this
happening in your tournaments because you are going to
be too short to really get these situations. In a cash game, this
can be really useful, once you have a few
thousand hands on somebody. But as you can imagine,
if we have this, we have a lot of other
really specific stats. So if you find something
you want to know more about, you can go through
out stat list and find if there's something there
that already does it. And this is one
where you might not want to pay attention to
it until you have a really good sample size on somebody. So how do you find
all the stat list? If you click Configure
from the menu bar and you choose
Statistics, it's going to pop open this window,
which is going to show you our entire stat list. So you guys are going to
want to change to tournament. And there are players
stats and hand stats for the different
kinds of reports. And you choose Stats here. So we're looking at
tournament player stats. You could see we have this list. We're just looking at
the call stats here. You could see the scroll bar. So we have a lot. If you want to search
for specific ones, you can just type-- if you type
three-bet in here you suddenly see only three-bet stats. So we're looking at a stat
called call preflop squeeze. If you were looking through
the stats and you saw this. And you said, well,
what is that situation. Well that situation
is described here in details in the
detailed description. A squeeze is when someone has
made a raise and someone else made a call. And then, somebody
three-bets both of them. That projects an image
of a lot of strength. This is talked about in
Harrington on Hold 'em as a great way to make a
move because if someone makes an open raise for three big
blinds and someone else calls, and you're sitting
there for 10 big blinds and you shovel all in,
the first player needs to decide what's the guy behind
me who called going to do, and what's this guy doing. He's got to have
a big hand if he's able to shove all
in over both of us. So that raise is
call to squeeze. If you face a squeeze,
and you call it, it will count for
this situation. If the player who made
the first raise folds, you still face the
squeeze if you called. So those are the two spots here. And you can see, we have the
detailed description that explains exactly what it was. And the formula gives you
the actual numbers we used. We don't say multiply
by 100 here just to keep it a little bit simpler. We have these
detailed descriptions for every stat on the list. So if you are so inclined, you
can spend several hours reading through our entire stat list. And I think you will probably
be the first person who has ever actually done it besides me. So all right. We've talked a lot
about opponents and what opponent stats can be. How do you find them? How do I look at opponent
stats in PokerTracker? This is going to be
important because you need to figure out
what these numbers mean for your various opponents. So the first way is in
the results section. We have a player summary report. We saw it in that
dropdown earlier. When you choose
this report, you're going to get one
row per player-- and I blocked out
the players' names for confidentiality reasons. But you can then see how many
tournaments they played in, what their VPIP is,
what their PFR is, what their three-bet
is, how often were their three-bets successful. That is how often they
three-bet and everyone folded to it, which is really
fun because if you have a really high
three-bet success, that means you can really
three-bet with impunity because everyone's folding. And it's great. So you pick up the open
raise, you pick up the blinds, you can make lots of money. You can see this guy is
good at picking spots. He's got 64%, 65%. This guy's terrible
at picking spots. He's only been successful
one time in three. With 17 tournaments,
it's probably some number like that,
two in six, one in three. So you want to go
deeper than that? I thought you did. We've got the hero
versus villain report. And what this does is each
row again shows one player, but it specifically
targets the hands where you both put money in. So these are hands
you won money from him or he won money from you. It breaks down by
different sizes, so you can see if you won lots
of big hands or small hands. So like, we lost three
reasonable sized pots to this guy. We don't have any big losses,
which is nice in this report. We don't have any
big wins either. We took three pretty
good sized pots from him. So if you highlight
one of these reports, you're going to get the
hands you were involved with this person in the bottom. So if one of your
friends has been playing in these
tournaments and saying he's been beating up on you,
you can go look in PokerTracker at the exact hands
you've played together, and tell him you're full of
it because here our hands, and I can see that you
did not beat me up. Look, you three-bet me
once and I had four, two. I'm clearly not
calling your three bet. That has nothing to do with you. So I'm sure you want to go
even deeper than that, right? On the sidebar, we also
have this player box. And you can choose a
new player, and you can choose any of your opponents. And when you load them
in here, what you're going to look at now is
all of the data in all of the reports of
PokerTracker-- everything we've been talking about,
you will be looking at from his perspective. So you are looking at all of
the data through his eyes. And the only thing you need
to really keep in mind when looking at data through
another player's eyes is that you only get hole card
data when he reaches showdown. If he doesn't
reach showdown, you don't know what his hole cards
are because the hand's not going to tell you. But anything else, for all
hands that reach showdown, you have full information. You have all of our reports, all
of our stats, all the filters. And if that is not enough for
you, I don't know what will be. So let's look at an example. We're going to look at
one example analysis. And hopefully, that will show
you how all of this stuff works together. Let's say, there's one situation
that was really bugging us. We've been playing in
these tournaments that are called Fifty50s. Fifty50 And the way
these work is that they pay out the top 5 places. 10 people start,
five people get paid. Once it gets down
to five players, everyone gets their buy in back. So if you've bought it for
$10, once you get in the top 5, you definitely
get your $10 back. And everybody who
is in the top 5 has some amount of chips left. So it takes the other
half of the prize pool and gives it out
to all the players, based on how many
chips they have. So that that's how a
Fifty50 tournament works. And we want to look at
times we're in the big blind because we're been playing
a lot of these; times we were six handed. So we're on the bubble. Once one more player goes
out, the tournament is over. That is the end
of the tournament. And we want to look at times
we have king, queen offsuit because that hand's
been bugging us. We don't need any
other reason, but we have a real situation here. So you go into the sidebar. You pick your Fifty50 flag. That will limit it to
Fifty50 tournaments. You go in to Hand Details,
Number of Players. Players dealt in a
hand, six to six. So now we're looking
at six handed play in Fifty50 tournaments. Actions and Opportunities,
Preflop, Post Big Blind-- bang-- add that to filter. Now we're looking at big blind
play in a Fifty50 tournament six handed. Hand Values. We just turn on king, queen. That's king, queen
offsuit there. King, queen suited
is on the other side. And we go into Actions and
Opportunities, Preflop, and turn on Opportunities,
and turn on Faced All In. We add those. We have all of our
filters right here. And so now, we have picked
out our situation entirely. And we can look at our spot. We have two hands in our
database that match that. It may have felt like
you had a lot of data, but sometimes, when you
go and you look at it, it turns out you don't have
as much as you thought. And that's OK. We're still going to look
at one of those hands. We've got two hands here. We'll look at the second one. We're going to replay it. We're going to see it in
the PokerTracker replayer. So here is our spot. Let's take a moment to look at. We're in the big blind,
just like we said. We have king and a queen. Fold, fold, fold, fold. And this guy pushes all in. So we're facing our
all in from him. So our chip stack is 1,955. His chip stack was 725. Our blinds were 60 and 120. And there was a 15 chip ante. So we have 90 chips. These were from the ante here. So we have to choose if we
want to call his 605 chip bet, or we want to fold to it with
king, queen here in this spot. So I want you to take
a second and think about whether you would call
here or whether you would fold. Remember, if you call
and you bust him, the tournament is over. You definitely win
money because he's out. You are in the top,
and you get more money based on your chip
stack plus your but-in. If you fold here, he
now picks up 210 chips. He now has 935 chips. He's still the short stack, and
we're going to keep playing. You have a king and a queen. I want you to just take a second
and think about our situation. The first thing you
should be thinking about, and I hope you were
thinking about, right now, is what
hands would he be playing to make
this all in raise with. Obviously, he could have aces. Obviously, he could have kings. What other hand? How far down is he
going to go when he makes this all in range? And before we can make any
adjustments based on stats, we have to have a baseline
because if we think the baseline player is playing
all in with any two cards here, it's going to radically
change how we adjust based on his stats because if
he's tighter than average, tighter than average
of 100% is going to be very different than
tighter than average of 10%. So think about what you think
an unknown player would play. Start to build this
model in your head. This is what all the
big name pros will do. They are able to
have a baseline model and then adjust based on
individual characteristics. So think about that. Think about what kinds
of hands he would play. Now let's add some stats. Now we're going
to start refining our model on this player. We've got a baseline idea in
our head of what kinds of hands he's going to play. Now let's look. We have 73 hands of data. His VPIP is 11. So in this 73 hands
that this guy's been playing, so it's probably
about two tournaments worth given the length of these terms. In two tournaments'
worth, he has put money in 11% of the time-- 1 hand
in 9, this guy is playing. That's it. Preflop raise, 1%. And I can tell you because
I did double check. This means, of his 73 hands,
he raised preflop before this exactly in only one time. That's it. Only once ever. In both tournaments
we've seen him play, he's only ever
raised once before. I hope that that changes
what hands you think this guy is going to play, at
least a little bit. Now we can look a little
bit deeper in his stats and try to see if there's
any information there. Let's look at his
small blind statistics. This is the Tools pop-up here. We're just looking
at the top half. There's some stuff
in the bottom, but it's all postflop stuff,
so it's not relevant right now. So let's just look
at small blind here. His VPIP from the
small blind is 13%. So one time out of eight, he put
money in from the small blind. He has never raised
from the small blind, ever, ever-- not once. So he did no raises of any kind. He seems to call
across all positions. So here are his callings. These are from the
preflop section. You can see he calls
from everywhere. He's called 4 out of 25 hands. He's called cold
twice, which means you call without having
put money in the pot. You can't call cold
from the blind. That's why these are
going to be zeros. He limps behind
limpers 1 out a 7. So he's not attacking people
who just called big blind. He's not attacking people
who are acting weak. He is folding to a
blind steal twice. When he's in a blind,
he's perfectly happy to give his blinds up. A blind steal is when you're
in a blind and someone in the cutoff, or the
button, the last two positions who haven't put blind
money in-- they make a raise. So when you're facing
a raise from them, it's called facing a steal. He's done that twice and
he folded both times. So you can start to
a piece all of this together and get an idea. But this sample is not huge. So think about what hands
this specific player is likely to raise
all in with, now that we have all of
this information. Remember, his tournament
life is on the line. If he is called, and he loses,
he is out of the tournament, he wins absolutely nothing. But he's the short stack. He has an m of about 2.7. He could go less than three
orbits before he is completely out of chips, just by folding. So he has to make a
move at some point. He has to pick a hand
and make a stand soon. So the fact that his
tournament life is on the line is going to make him
tighter because he doesn't want to lose the tournament. The fact that he is so
short with such a short m, is going to make him looser. So these kind of are in
conflict with one another. And as you play
more tournaments, you're going to find
out how they poll. Do you think this guy is going
to play low pocket pairs? Do you think he's going
to pick deuces here, and happy to play a coin
flipper for his tournament life? I see one person
shaking his head. What about weak aces? Do you think ace,
four offsuit is OK? Do you think he's willing
to take his tournament life into his hands with
just a really weak ace? What about king, queen. Could we have the
same hand here? Would he make this
shove with my hand? King, 10? Could we have him
completely dominated? So that's another poker term. If you have the same
card and your other card is better than theirs,
it's called dominating. You're 70 to 30 favorite in
that spot-- something like that. A queen, jack-- same
kind of situation. If he's willing to do
it with these hands, then we're in a really
great spot, right? We have to decide what this
player would open raise with. So now we're starting
to build that model. Remember, his VPIP is 11%,
so let's start-- first, if you want to convert
percentages to actual hands, the equity calculator
in PokerTracker will help you with
this because it's kind of hard to know
what 11% of hands is. Especially if you don't
have experience with it, you're like, I don't know. So you can come into
the equity calculator. And you can pop that open. And you can choose
Hand Range Selector. And then you can use
the slider, and you can see what the model says. Again, we're still
in Glansky-Carlson. You can play between the models. So this is 15%. So think about the
hands that you've just decided this guy's
willing to go all in with. Here's a 15% range according
to Glansky-Carlson. Wider. Looser. So this guys is down to ace,
four suitedl down to king, 10 suited; pairs, down to three
not twos; and down to ace, eight. that's 15% of all hands. Well, we said he'll play 11% of
hands, overall over 73 hands. So let's start by saying,
any hand in the top 11%. He'll play those. It's not going to be perfect. Our sample's not fantastic. We know this, but we're trying
to get an idea for what's right to do here in the spot. So this is the top 11%. You don't have the
bottom two pairs. You don't have any
weak aces at all. Even ace, nine is
considered a middling ace. So that's not too bad. He has no weak suited aces. That's a 11% range. That's a pretty strong range. So PokerTracker also has a built
in calculator that does ICM. ICM stands for the
Independent Chip Model. This has been out there
for a little while. And what the ICM does is
it takes tournament chips and converts them to
real world dollars because tournament chips
and real world dollars don't have a one
to one correlation because your last
tournament chip is worth a lot more than
your thousandth tournament chip, if you have 1,000 chip
stack-- because once you're out, you can win nothing. But that extra chip
doesn't mean quite as much. So this model takes your
equity, your total chip stack, and gives you a result as
an equity in the prize pool. It says, with this chip
stack, if everything were even-- ceteris paribus--
nothing else to be considered, this is what your
equity in the prize pool should be according
to the model. This has been there in the
replayer the entire time. I don't know if you noticed
it, but if you click it, it will show you the
results in this spot. So we're going to be looking at
the times we face this all in, and we will see what
the average model says whether we should push or fold
in this spot with this hand. So who thinks we should
call his all in raise, if he was an average player? Everyone else I
presume says fold. The default model says call. Everyone who raised
your hand, you guys win. So you can click the
blue results link here, you can see the full ICM tree. But the important
thing to note right now is you can look and see
what your prize pool equity is, right here. If you push, you can
say you would have, against the average model,
a 15.83% equity in the prize pool. If you fold, 15.28%. Now keep in mind, this is just
against the average model. This is not based
on anything we've done specifically to
analyze this player. But the good news is,
we can change that. And we can see what
the model's range was. So when we click
results, we're going to see what the model says the
average player would raise all in with in this spot. And the default range is--
drum roll, please-- 33.9%. The default model says
the average player will raise all in
with an m of 2.7, when folded to in the small
blind with about 34% of hands. We built this model using some
pretty robust data analysis. But as we've seen, different
players play very differently. And this player is most
certainly not average because we put him on somewhere
much tighter than 33.9%. And you can see push
equity here and fold equity or not that different. We're only talking
0.6% of the prize pool. So if we're playing
a $10 tournament, we're talking about the
difference between an expected result of $0.60. It's not huge, but each
little edge in poker adds up, one piece right
on top of the other. And making these decisions
in the marginal spots is really how you can
expand your advantage and play better
than your opponents. So let's change that. So you can click right
here, once you've been looking at the model results. You can change his range. So this, by the way,
is what 33% looks like. So the average player here
shoving as weak as queen, eight suited; king, two
suited; king, six offsuit; any pair; any ace. That's a lot of hands. These are weak, weak hands. So we change it. We'll drag the slider down
from 33.8% down to 11%. Suddenly, now we're looking
at a whole lot tighter range. With the updated range,
who thinks it's a call now? Good, I'm glad nobody thinks
it's a call because it is in fact, a fold. So by looking at this
player, by doing analysis of his previous play, we were
able to turn a close call into a close fold. And so in this spot,
when he has this range, our push equity is 14.85% and
fold equity is 15 and 1/4%. And you can actually
play with this. And you can keep changing
and updating the range. And you can figure out
what break even is. So if he knew what
our cards, were, if we turned them face
up, we can figure out what's the game theory optimal
pushing range for him, right? When we turn our king, queen up,
if he could play perfect poker, he would have
pushed a 24% range. That would be king, nine
suited; any ace; any pair; queen, ten suited; king,
10 offsuit, or better. If we think he is
pushing less than that, it's definitely a fold for us. If he is pushing more
than that, it's a call. So we now have established
what a break even range is for us facing a
push from a short stack at the end of a tournament in
a tournament type that we play. So next time that we're
sitting in the big blind, and we face a shove from
a short stack, who's in the small blind,
we have a better idea of what things to look at
and how much to skew things based on his range. If you're starting
to see 50%, 60%, and you're sitting with king,
queen, you're in a great spot to call, assuming you're in
a otherwise similar situation with your chips relative
to the rest of the table. But in this spot, against
this guy, it's a fold. So of course, in the
actual tournament, hero called because you
always make the wrong play the first time you're
in the situation. So hero called here with
king, queen offsuit. And we get a lovely,
wonderful flop. We've got the king, nine, two. So hurray, we hit our pair. This is great. Your heart starts racing. There's the turn. It's an offsuit seven. Fantastical. If he has two diamonds, he
doesn't have a flush yet. None of the straights came in. Uh-oh. There's another diamond. So now if he has two diamonds,
he could have a flush. One of the hands that was
in his range was ace, king. If he has ace, king,
he also beats is. So if he has queens, kings,
aces, ace king, or any two diamonds, he wins. And of course, his actual
hand was ace, five offsuit. I want to point out
that ace, five offsuit was not in our range
analysis for him. So our range was
actually too tight. So in the future,
when we're trying to do this kind of analysis, we
can update our range by saying, hey, the last time I
did an analysis of a guy that I thought was really
tight, when he was super short, he was looser than I thought. You can add those
extra few percent in when you're updating
your ranges later. No worries about ace, king. Certainly no flush. He did have one diamond though. So here are our take aways. You should think about poker as
a series of discrete decisions that you're going to
make when you're playing. You can use PokerTracker's
filter system to target those very
specific decisions. As we've seen, you can
filter for anything under the sun you would like. You can save filters for later. So target those. Pick the spots that bug you. Pick the spots that
you're going to remember. Next time you have six, six,
and you're out of position, and it's on the flop, and
there's a king up there, and you made a raise
preflop, and you're not sure whether you should bet
or you should check, you can pick that spot
and you can look at it. And when you check, call,
then the turn is a queen, you can decide, do I want to
check or do I want to bet. You can pick these spots. And then when the river 10
comes, it just sucks to be you. You can use the
available information to build a mental model
of your opponents. Look, this is the way
people play poker. You try to imagine what's going
on in your opponent's head. You try to go, how is this
player going to think. How does he make decisions. So that's what I'm
calling this mental model. It's all of the
heuristics that's going on in his head or her head
to make a specific decision. Analyze your options based
on your mental model. Think about what you can do. Think about how his actions
are going to affect your play. Think about how your
hand affects it. And when your mental model
is proven wrong, like it just was, we did not think that
guy had ace, five offsuit, you can adjust your model. And you will get better at
poker if you continue to analyze your game one hand at the time. So I hope that that
was instructive and that I opened your eyes
a little bit to all the power that PokerTracker
has to offer for you. If you have any questions,
I'd be happy to take them. [APPLAUSE]
