Poker Software Review

I am using some software tools that I want to recommend. If you are not using these tools then you are really leaving money on the table.

Hold em manager and Poker academy Prospector are two very similar products that let you analyze your game breaking your performance by:

• Holding type. This lets you ask "How profitable are my AKo? AA? 72o?, How profitable are my AKo vs AKs?"
• Position. "Out of all my AKo, how much more money I make from the button/cutoff/high jack?"
• Stakes. "I know I seem to do better at the lower stakes, is this true?" lets you compare apples to apples by showing the performance on big blinds per 100 hands (bb/100) between a range of hands.
• Previous action. "Am I losing or making money by playing this AKo against a button raise in the big blind?" or "How profitable are my AKo vs AKs from the button/cutoff/big blind or overall (all positions)?"
• Holdem Manager has an increadible feature that lets you see what your "all-in" equity is. Lets say you are 100bb deep and get your Aces all-in pre-flop against PocketKings. You know that you are an 80-20 favorite but actual results will vary. This particular time the poker gods smiled at the other guy and you lose the hand. Holdem manager tells you your actual loss was 100bb but your EV (Expected value) is 160bb (100bb you, 100bb villain = 200bb * 80% = 160bb).

The most profitable hands in poker are pocket pairs, how many times am I seeing a flop with pocket pairs (99-22)? how many times you hit a set (1/7)? How many big blinds am I winning once I hit a set (in bb/100).

If you have never used any of these two tools I highly recommend that you download one of them and try them. Keep in mind that the variance in poker will skew the numbers violently for low number of hands (<20K kind of numbers). The higher the number of hands in your file the better specially for the more detailed stats.

Next week"Poker stove"...

Pokerstars bonus status

My last Pokerstars deposit entitled me to a 50% deposit bonus. Let me take a moment to clarify that although I am still not a solid winning player at all stakes (!) I am constantly tweaking my game and probing other games/stakes to see what game is more profitable/(least unprofitable?). It looks like am a slight loser on the low stakes and a winner in the somewhat higher stakes (relatively speaking) because against these players you just have no other option than to play your hand. I find it very difficult to sit waiting for the very premium hands (since position decreases in value somewhat) and get impatient. One thing I discovered is that if you get raised at the very low stakes you are beat, players just do not raise bluff at all.

Back to the bonus: The best way to get the bonus to clear as soon as possible is to play limit tables because the pots on those tables reach the threshold amount much more frequently than on the no-limit tables.

Some advice: Play tight on the limit tables but also make good use of position to play some drawing hands. Because of Morton's theorem drawing hands on these type of games seem to be very profitable and that has been my experience also. Games are lose and betting can escalate out of control very quickly.

Good luck at the tables!

Going broke with Top pair-Top kicker

There are several things that can harm your ability to play poker profitably. One of the biggest problem I had was that I was not able to get away from "Top pair-Top kicker" in somewhat deep games. Getting stacked with top pair top kicker when all I had was 50BB was not relly a big deal but getting stacked with 100-200 bb is! This was bothering me soo much that I was kind of going on tilt and losing more money!

I kind of solved this problem by only buying 50 big-blinds deep on my games. If I doubled up, I would be put back in the "sitting with 100bb" and would be susceptible to losing my stack with an overpair or tptk again. So if you have this problem I would suggest that you only buy in for 50 BB and to remove your money from the table if you double up.

Pocket kings Chess...

Pocket kings Chess... Chess and Poker. Those two games have been taking a large chunk of my free time and are so similar, contrary to what most people believe.

In chess and in Poker the player action has almost no mechanical component, its only a mental decision. This is in contrast to baseball, tennis, football... even golf, where form and the execution of the movement count for a great deal. In chess the decision is what piece to move and where to move it to. In poker the decision is one of 4 things: Fold, Check, Bet or Raise; there are also degrees in betting and raising but lets leave those out for now.

This means that I can leverage many things I learned how to do to get better at chess and use it to get better at poker. I will be reporting on my progress here and discussing things I find interesting.