HEM1 Multi-Table Ratio

There was a request on the forums this week to figure out winrates and hourly based on multi-table ratio in HEM. This has been sorely missed in HEM1 but is being included in HEM2. If you're like me and think that despite HEM2 still being in Beta mode and wanting to cut them some slack, you're going to wait it out until PT4 arives because so far HEM2 is a massive resource hog and "looks like a 15 year old girls MySpace page," here's a MTR Extraction excel sheet I made to tie you over.

Multi-Table Ratio Extraction Sheet

Just go to your sessions tab, filter for HU, 6max, FR by number of players. I think it's important to filter just by one stake because your winrate is going to drop at higher stakes obviously and you just want to find your optimal number of tables. Once you have your results, right click them and save as Sessions.csv. Open that up in Excel and copy everything. Paste it into the MTR Extraction sheet in the cell indicated. Adjust the 3 variables to your filtered game and you should have your results. The % of hands required is there to push out the outliers such as the few 1-3 tabling sessions I had that totaled 43 hands and +/- 170 bb/100 etc. Top graph is winrate by tables, bottom is hourly by tables. As is, the MTR sheet will support ~500 sessions so you'll have to adjust some formulas if you need more than that. It's not formated to look nice at all, but it does the job.

I got in a little early for the HEM2 beta testing just before the public beta release came out and tried it out for a few days before giving up in frustration with the constant crashing and huge amount of lag I was experiencing. I thought it was just my dinosaur of a PC giving me issues, but apparently people with more up to date systems are experiencing the same thing. That and it kind of seems like they've loaded it full of gimmicks that are more fun to look at than actually being helpful.

I do remember pre-ordering PT3 and being very disappointed and managed to whine enough about the HUD fail to get my money back after 5 months of "commercial" release before switching to HEM, and PT3 eventually turned into a decent product. I really don't want to go through that again with HEM2 so I'm going to wait to see if PT4 is decent. If it's not, I'm just going to be happy with HEM1 for the next year until one of them gets their stuff together.

Software Conglomeration Post

I posted earlier this year that I was planning on doing a bunch of software reviews this year but things have changed and I've decided to write up this conglomeration of my current setup instead.

This stemmed from the fact that I was generally unhappy with my ability to find software out there that does exactly what I wanted it to do without getting something custom written up for me. My biggest issue by far was being able to get rid of bad tables and load up new ones. I wish I was an AHK pro as that would make life a lot easier. Closing tables is quite labor intensive when mass tabling considering that once you sit out next bb on a table it disappears to the bottom of the stack. Stars apparently does not see the logic in adding Sit Out and Close Next BB This Table to their play controls after it's been requested ad nauseum even though they have exactly that function to close all your tables.

I'm also currently trying out Notecaddy and I'm fairly happy with it so far. The biggest thing initially for me was the ability to take "notes" based on actions in a concise way since I basically take zero notes on my own. Up until this point my notes basically consisted of remembering how regs generally play different ranges and feeding off the game dynamic along with stats. I also can't make any sense out of taking notes like most people do by writing up what happened on xyz board with 1/2 PSB when villain was OOP and he turned a back door flush draw. That means nothing to me. Having note caddy quantify the percentage of the time this reg cbet and shutdown or that reg pot controlled a certain hand strength is much more useful to me. This is essentially my custom stat program as HEM does not have the ability to create custom stats like PT3 does. I'm still up in the air about the automatic color coding as I sometimes have to reset my colors in the Stars client and I'm not really completely sure about how I want to classify people - need to do more tweaking in this area since I only have 20% of people falling under an auto-color category.

So back to closing tables... I was obviously using the standard stuff that every grinder out there is using: Table Ninja, HEM, and a table layout manager (SaT in my case). I quite enjoyed the stacking and tiling functionality of Stack and Tile moving tables in and out of the stack based on hands where I vpip. There's also some other nice stuff out there like Placemint and a plethora of useful AHK scripts. But the ability to close specific tables efficiently was just not available.

Along comes Thois with his discontinued Table of Interest and after months and months of everyone pleading with him to sell it to them, he makes it free and unsupported. And guess what! It closes tables where I'm sitting out! Now all I have to do is Table Ninja hotkey sit out next bb target table and ToI closes it for me once that happens solving nearly all of my problems. I grabbed a simple table counter AHK off the forum, modified it to display different background colors based on how many table I have open and now I've got just about everything I need.

The only thing left on my list is something in the HUD that will tell me the quality of the table based on my own rules. Theres a lot of stuff out there that falls just short and right now I'm still relying on the old HEM table vpip/pfr averages and taking a quick look to my right.

The as of now shelved Table Retriever would have been a huge boon to opening/closing and categorizing tables based on user preferences. The beta testing on this software was very exciting in that I could automatically close tables based on number of fish or number of regs or stack sizes (my definitions of each) and their location around the table. Unfortunately it was put on hold indefinitely when Stars made the buyin structure changes and the developer decided that the vast majority of business which was supposed to come from shortstackers using it to rathole rules automatically leaving according to their own stack size and a rathole timer list would be lost. I still see a ton of value in it for automating table and seat selection for the regular grinder.

I tried out Table Scan Turbo which has a small HUD with table information. Very useful in that it has a fish on this table stat as well as a popup displaying a pretty useful table summary with player names, player type symbols and stack sizes. Not quite what I'm looking for though as a table full of bad regs might look bad when it's not. This might be worth another look as I didn't do a ton of customization.

Next I went back to the HEM HUD. Note that you can add the redundant Player Score from the HEM Scanner to the player HUD - I can see someone has a score of 5+ which indicates they're a fish according to my rules, or I could just look at their vpip/pfr which would tell me exactly the same thing. Also note that the HUD displays table vpip/pfr averages. I find it completely illogical that they have not gone ahead and added Table Score alongside table average vpip/pfr. This would actually be the most useful tool out there to gauge table quality according to my specifications. Sure Table Score is visible from the Scanner, but you can't actually close tables from there. That would be another nice feature and combined would make HEM Scanner the nuts.

So overall I'm pretty happy with my current setup and I've seen a marked improvement in my winrate now that I'm regularly table hopping in and out of 3-6 tables every 15 minutes and I feel like I'm 90% of the way towards what would be an optimal mass tabling system for me.

Stars vs FTP Value Tracker

Note: Those that downloaded before 6:30pm EST today, please re-download as I found a few bugs.

While I'm waiting to decide on whether to go back to Stars or not, I thought I should get a start on Full Tilt's Iron Man and Black Card statuses. I'll make my final decision once I see the layout of Stars' player pool after the 20-50 tables are gone.

So in the meantime I wanted to actually see the differences and made myself a spreadsheet to track my earnings and bonus value on both sites. There are 3 sheets in the excel file: Stars, FTP, and combined with a number of entries to help you track your value. Yes, some of this can be tracked in your HH tracker database, but I think it's interesting to see how your bonus value and effective rakeback % moves based on how much volume you play and which bonuses you receive over time in the Rakeback to Month End column.

 I've highlighted the cells in the screenshot which you'll want to use to enter data. The rest have formulas. I kind of suck at creating a locked working document for download so I've left everything unlocked. I've added my data sans winnings to give you an idea.

It currently calculates FPP value based on your regular bonus -- $1.5k for 100k FPP = $0.015/FPP. I also have a calculation for Full Tilt Point value if you buy Black Card cash bonuses although I assume you would just leave those points blank if you're not BC. I'm not all that familiar with the FTP VIP program yet and there seems to be a lot of variability in the value of medals so I just left a spot to enter direct $ for those under Other Bonuses. I assume you might have to manually adjust the Other Bonus tab to account for MGR hits. I'll hopefully update this as I get a better grasp of the FTP program.

Value Tracker Excel File
Enjoy!

2011 Software Reviews

Lately I've been looking around at a bunch of software out there designed to automate many of the chores involved with playing online poker. What I've found so far has been absolutely great. There are a lot of very talented poker players / programmers out there that understand the grinder's issues and headaches and have come up with a bunch of ways to reduce mouse clicks and stress to let you have more time for decisions and save energy.

You'll notice I've rearranged the blog a bit and it's slightly wider to make room for the improved sidebar. I've added a Software I Use section and I'll start adding the software I have continued to use on a day to day basis to that list as my reviews roll in.

Contest Winner!

And the winner is... bobby13!

Sorry to bobby and Splitsuit for the extra sweat. I didn't realize I had to moderate comments on the last post already =)

bobby13's guess of 3500 is within 163.36 bb of my actual 3336.64 bb below AIEV. Congrats! If you could post your 2p2 screenname as a comment below or give me some other way to contact you I'll get you your free copy of Tilt Breaker.

Thanks to everyone who put in a guess! And now it's time for me to slam the lid on this graph and get back to trying to run average =)

Tilt Breaker Contest Update

Ok so since you guys are a bunch of nits and don't want to send in your tilty stories I'm forced to change this up =)

I'll make this easy. To get your free copy of Tilt Breaker, you need to guess how many big blinds below all-in-EV I ran during my Summer of Runbad 2010. I am including all full ring hands between June 1 00:00 and September 30 23:59:59. There's a total of 124,776 hands.

Post your guesses as comments below to 2 decimal points. You have until Friday, November 12th at 12:00 EST. 1 guess per person. Closest guess over or under wins. In the event of a tie, the over will take it.

Tilt Breaker Contest!

*** Terms of this contest changed as of Saturday November 6th. Updated contest info HERE.***

Here's your chance to win a completely FREE copy of Tilt Breaker. As I stated in my last post, this is amazingly effective, must-have software for helping you keep tilt from severely damaging your bankroll. Lifetime licenses are currently retailing for $49 at TiltBreaker.com.

To re-cap:

• Play more of your volume on your A game.
• Trailing stop loss to keep you from blowing away your profits.
• Stop checking the cashier during your session.
• No more bankroll crippling monkey-tilt sessions.

I got in contact with the people from Tilt Breaker after my last post and they would like to give one of my blog readers a free copy of their software.

Here's what you have to do:

Send me your best (worst) or funniest poker related tilt story. You can use whatever format you would like. Written, video, photoshop, mspaint, xtranormal or whatever else you can think of.

Email me with your entries by Monday, November 8th. I will pick a winner on Friday of that week and post the winning story on my blog.

Winrate, VPP and FPP Calculator v.2.1

Hey guys, I made a few changes and updates to my old excel calculator.

Version 2.1 can be found here.



The new one simplifies a few items and also includes new calculations for milestones, rakeback equivalent, and exchange rates. The milestone calculations currently only work up to the 600k VPP milestone since Stars skips the 700k mark bonus (and people that make 700k VPPs make me sick anyways :p ). I especially like using this calculator for long term calculations where I make my session length the amount of hours I would play in a month or year.

Same as the last one, only fill in data in the white spaces. Formulas are all open for you to re-configure for yourselves.

Let me know if you think any of the resulting data is incorrect or unnecessary or irrelevant. I'm thinking of removing some of the stuff on the left hand winrate calculator side.

Update and biggest pot ever!

Thought I'd post an update seeing as how I don't get around to posting that much anymore. I've been watching a lot of videos lately on DC. Most notably the Coaching Tree videos with BalugaWhale and his team. Incredibly awesome stuff!

I try to watch one every day or so and have noticed myself progressively playing a lot more spots comfortably. It kind of feels like everything is starting to click. When I previously tried to loosen up my game, I think I went about it the wrong way. I was basically just trying to play more hands. That's going to result in disaster (or at least no improvement in winrate).

But now, I'm finding I'm playing all sorts of hands without even realizing that I'm running super loose until I check my HEM stats after a session. I think that tells me that I'm doing it right now.

It's not a matter of playing more hands for the sake of playing more hands. It's a matter of seeing more and more profitable spots and pushing my skill edge in those spots. I totally understand the framework behind what's going on when I see high stakes players on edited poker TV shows or at the online nosebleeds pushing garbage around in what looks like donk-on-donk violence sessions.

I'm also starting to make the move up to 100NL permanent. I've put in about 30-40% of my volume there this month with fantastic results along with a lot of hours at 50NL grinding out buyins, experimenting and really focussing on improving my game. I like to use a 3 stake system where I can play low if I am not on my A game but want a poker fix, play my A game and grind in my "home" level, and take shots at the next.

So far this has been 25NL/50NL/100NL for the past few months for me. I've started to put in a little bit of time at 200NL although hardly anything yet as I'm trying to make 100NL home and 50NL the low end. I have not opened a single 25NL table this month.

Also really liking the HEM Scanner. I kind of sucked at table selection prior to this but apparently I have a good scoring system since the tables with the highest scores usually have a monster waiting list. I'm not sure if I'm going to just buy the client side for a one time payment or pick the subscription for server side. Server side is so much faster and a lot of fish are long gone by the time it's finished scanning in client side.

Anyways, BIGGEST HAND EVER in my life happened this week:

UTG+1 is 8/6. MP2 is a squeeze-happy supernova elite.

I had a mini-heart attack on the turn.

Poker Stars $1/$2 No Limit Hold'em - 9 players - View hand 119198
The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

Hero (MP1): $203.00
MP2: $200.00
CO: $216.20
BTN: $336.00
SB: $214.50
BB: $41.80
UTG: $59.15
UTG+1: $200.00
UTG+2: $200.00

Pre Flop: ($3.00) Hero is MP1 with K K
1 fold, UTG+1 raises to $6, 1 fold, Hero calls $6, MP2 raises to $24, 4 folds, UTG+1 calls $18, Hero raises to $72, 1 fold, UTG+1 raises to $200 all in, Hero calls $128

Flop: ($427.00) K 4 4 (2 players - 1 is all in)

Turn: ($427.00) A (2 players - 1 is all in)

River: ($427.00) 5 (2 players - 1 is all in)

Final Pot: $427.00
Hero shows K K (a full house, Kings full of Fours)
UTG+1 shows Q Q (two pair, Queens and Fours)
Hero wins $424.00
(Rake: $3.00)

Retooling Your HUD

I read a great poohbah post by RapidEvolution the other day about loosening up your game. It made me think about what I've done since loosening up my game and the big thing that stood out for me was that I failed to effectively use my HUD. I was using it as a crutch and looking at useless stats at the same time - a disaster for decision making.

So I thought about this for a few days and decided to go through all the stats available and think "how would this stat help me?" "What situations do I find myself in a lot and which stats do I need to help me in those spots?" Some stats are going to be more important than others for you depending on your style.

And then I did something I should have done long ago that I didn't. I put in minimum number of samples for the stat to be displayed. Without doing this you are essentially using a faulty crutch. Displaying fold to cbet when you have 100 hands on someone doesn't really tell you much. How many cbets has he faced? 2 or 3 if he's a nit for 0%, 33%, 50%, 67%, or 100%? That's a pretty big range that tells you nothing so just put it out of site and out of mind. On the other hand, you might have a LAG that has a decent sample to go off of much sooner than the nit and you need to clarify when a stat becomes suitable for use.

The resulting HUD looked somewhat bleak at first glance - it was more than 1/2 empty for most players. Some players that I have more than 2k hands on still only have 3/4 of their stats displayed. But after thinking about it, this is going to improve my game tremendously. It is going to stop me from making decisions based on stats that are not accurate, plus it is going to force me to do my own hand reading and pay more attention to the line they are taking.

Stats should take a big back seat to reads, lines and hand reading to begin with. Using a faulty HUD is a recipe for disaster, so figure out what you need out of it and when you can start using it.

Full Tilt?

I feel like blogging today, so you'll probably see a few posts from me today. I'm not sure what I feel like blogging about, but I'll come up with something.

I've been considering switching to Full Tilt for the rest of the year for rakeback since I am probably not going to achieve Supernova. If the last 2 days are any indication though, I am not going to like it and I think I am going to go back to Stars anyways.

The software is slow and tilts me.
The lobby is fast and tilts me.
The lobby is unorganized and tilts me.

And so far in the first 4k hands, I have not stacked anyone. There are apparently spewtards all over the place but I haven't found them yet, and the player pool seems incredibly small compared to the last time I played there and especially small compared to Stars.

25NL felt like 100NL at Stars. The aggression levels are unheard of at Stars 25NL. I'm not quite sure what to think of a table full of 25/18/3s that only go to showdown 15% of the time at this level, I've probably haven't encountered more than 20-30 of these types of players in the past 6 months on Stars. Normally they're bad and going to showdown 30%+ of the time.

It might just be variance and I should actually be valuebetting harder cause people just don't fold the flop or turn and float a lot. Maybe I was just running cold for 4k hands, but it reminds me of exactly what was happening over there when I decided to leave last time and it's tough to valuebet when you are missing more flops than usual and thus they think you have AK all the time.

Probably just head back because I just can't stand the software and it's really affecting my winrate. It's not worth the rakeback to cut my winrate in 1/2.

ptBB / VPP+FPP Calculator

ptBB / VPP + FPP Calculator v.1.1

I was bored at work a few days ago so I decided to make this ptBB/100 / VPP+FPP Calculator in MS Excel. I was tired of punching in the same calculations over and over on a calculator, so this makes it easy to see a lot of info at once by changing your variables. The VPP+FPP part is obviously for Stars.

Just enter your data in the white boxes, the coloured ones are labels and formulas. I just put in some estimates for VPP rates and have no idea if they are correct so you'll want to change these or your stakes if you play higher or have different VPP rates. Everything is calculated off your VPP multiplier and the variables you input for the "Hands / Hour / Table" and "Tables" fields.

I like to use it to figure out long term goals, like if I play 1040 hours for the year, just type in a 1040 hour session, etc etc. You can enter a specific VPP target and figure out how many hours that will take, and I've included some benchmark points for VPPs and FPPs for quick reference.

I posted a different one in the FR chat thread the other day, but this one is a little more polished and I toned down the gawdy colours. Any suggestions are appreciated, just post a comment. Enjoy!

Holdem Manager

I complain and complain and complain, and what does it get me? A PT3 refund is what. I hadn't really been able to use the HUD for the past 2 months due to lag issues, so I had gone back to using PT2 and PAHUD which sucked since after using the next generation software, going back feel horrible. I thought, ok I'll wait it out for PT3, but eventually I realized it's not going to happen and said screw it, I didn't pay for PT2 and PAHUD, I paid for a working version of PT3.

I explained that I did not pay to be a beta tester. Let me cut off those that always seem to say "well there's a trial version." I tried beta 11 for the month before commercial build 1 was released and it actually worked really well. I assumed that build 1 would be just as good and include tons of features to make it at least as good as PT2, import faster, and possibly have awesome new features, so I bought it the day it came out. Unlucky for me. I had nothing but lag and hours and hours of reimporting hands into new databases to try to get this worked out over the past 5 months.

After I got my refund, I went and downloaded the trial version of Holdem Manager: Yes, I am smart. SMRT. Tried it for 1 day and was thoroughly impressed and I bought it, although it is slightly slower than PT3 so far - that said, I haven't vacuumed or anything yet.

What definately sold me on it was the absolutely incredible amount of detail available in the HUD, especially in the pop-up stats. I am no longer guessing that this 20/15 only plays 8/6 in EP, I know it. Just incredible. I found the HUD much easier to customize as well, although the default turned out to be exactly what I had planned on changing my PAHUD settings to prior to buying HEM. I love this software - I highly recommend it.

I changed things around a bit, I used to have:
VPIP / PFR / AF / hands
Cbet / Fold to Cbet / ATS / Fold to Steal

I thought why do we put AF in the first line with preflop info and ATS and Fold to Steal in the second line with postflop info?

I now have:
name / hands
VPIP / PFR / ATS / 3bet%
AF / Ag Freq. / Cbet / Fold to Cbet /

I also really like the idea of making the colour coding fainter for smaller sample sizes when the numbers are not solid enough to rely on, which HEM does automatically. I'm not sure at what point they consider each stat sample to be large enough, but it seems to be working well.

Happy New Year - Graphs and Such

Time for a graph update. This graph is from the start of this blog on November 1st to today. I only made about $140 mostly at 5nl and 10nl - FR and 6 max - in December due to it being such a busy month and I didn't really feel like playing much. The last 22k hands are from December.


I wanted to be playing 25nl by now but I took a couple of shots with some bad results. I will be moving up to 25nl in January as I currently have 20 buyins for that level - probably once I have 25 buyins.

I also had this hand today which put me on major tilt, I considered cashing out because I run so bad on this site for some reason, but thought twice about it and decided to stay since the games are so loose. I'll keep plugging away at it. Managed to get my money back about 100 hands later from the same guy. The appearance of tilt after it's gone can sometimes work amazingly well - ie. shoving AA the next hand after a bad beat, there is a huge chance you will be called by 99+/AJ+.

Full Tilt Poker, $0.05/$0.10 NL Hold'em Cash Game, 4 Players
LeggoPoker.com - Hand History Converter

BB: $20.35
Hero (UTG): $15.50
BTN: $9.95
SB: $4.30

Pre-Flop: T T dealt to Hero (UTG)
Hero raises to $0.35, BTN calls $0.35, SB calls $0.30, BB calls $0.25

Flop: ($1.40) A 8 T (4 Players)
SB checks, BB checks, Hero bets $1, 2 folds, BB raises to $3, Hero calls $2

Turn: ($7.40) 6 (2 Players)
BB bets $4.20, Hero raises to $12.15 and is All-In, BB calls $7.95

River: ($31.70) 8 (2 Players - 1 is All-In)

Results: $31.70 Pot ($1 Rake)
BB showed 8 8 (four of a kind, Eights) and WON $30.70 (+$15.20 NET)
Hero showed T T (a full house, Tens full of Eights) and LOST (-$15.50 NET)

Software to help you with your game

I feel like writing today, so I'll add another post about software that I use to help me with my game. I'll list software and links to where you can find it as well:

Poker Tracker $55 USD

This is the must have tool for keeping track of your winnings, your stats, and most importantly the stats of your opponents. You can filter all sorts of stuff to figure out how well you are playing in certain situations. I also play back my hands in the hand replay window to review how I played - this is very important to do if you want to improve. It will pay itself off multiplie times over. The trial version lets you enter up to 1000 hands.

PokerAce HUD (Heads Up Display) $25 USD

Instead of having to open up Poker Tracker to quickly look up stats on your opponents, which you often don't have time to do, PAHUD overlays the stats you want on your opponents right on the table. You can also pop up a window with more detailed stats by clicking on a players name. This is very helpful when multi-tabling. This will also pay itself off many times over.

Pokergrapher Free - requires Poker Tracker

This program will take your Poker Tracker database and graph your winnings over time. You can also filter this by which sites and stakes you play at.

Poker Stove Free

I find this program useful when I review my sessions. You can basically put in your hand and a number of hands that your opponent may have in a situation and it will tell you what your equity is based on that range.

Poker EV Free

This is kind of a neat little tool to figure out what you should have won compared to what you have won (Sklanksy bucks). It's also got a tool to show you how lucky or unlucky you are over time and on what streets you are making the biggest mistakes. It has some filter options as well.

Setometer Free

I picked this one up today. It's kind of interesting to see how often you flop a set with a pocket pair within a standard variation and how often you win in those kinds of situations. It's also got some other stats like whether you win with KK vs AA or vise versa. It basically shows how you do in way ahead/way behind situations. For me it helps put the coolers and suckouts into perspective, because they really don't happen as often as it seems like they do and in the end they do even out to the expected value.