The basic stats thread for newbies. (UPDATED 11/06)

[lucky_scrote]

This thread will be for people who take advantage of using holdem manager and poker tracker.

I am sure there are a ton of these threads for newbies on other forums, but we don't have one yet and at least I can answer some questions. If you have never used a HUD (heads up display) before, then please wait until you understand some basics.

The first few basic stats are:

• VPIP
• PFR
• AF
• Hands

VPIP

Voluntarily put money into pot.

An optimum amount of hands to play preflop in a 6max game is approx 18-25% depending on experience, stakes and standard of play. If players are worse, then you can generally get away with playing more hands preflop as people 3-bet you with only premium hands. The more hands you play, the harder post flop play becomes therefore you require experience to play a bit looser.

PFR

Pre-flop raise.

For me, I almost always enter the pot with a raise, or a reraise. Calling for me happens about 3% of the time preflop. In otherwords. If your VPIP is 21 and only call 3% of the time preflop then your PFR is 18. Simple! When you see players with a very low PFR they are losers of the game. They become obvious to you when they have a big hand preflop (because they raise, duh) and set mining/calling with suited connectors becomes super profitable!

AF

Aggression factor.

I'll make this simple, a number between 2 and 3 is generally ideal. 1 means they are passive (almost always a fish) and anything over about 4 means they could possibly be overly aggressive. Don't be too deceived by this though, a high number quite often means the player just doesn't slow play much rather than just having a high bet frequency.

Hands

A good hand sample to give away the basic style of the player is probably 200+. When you start learning more of the complex stats (for example, how often they 3bet on the button) then you will need probably 2000+ hands.

A good hand sample to give you an idea of your true win rate is about 100,000., you could say that having an idea of your true win rate is impossible since the game is always changing, and hypothetically, it is possible for a very weak player who should be losing hard, to be winning over 100k hands (This is probably billions to one though).


Now that you have an idea what these stats mean, go and play a session then check back at your own stats. Reflect them to this thread and try to improve. Perhaps on your second session you can get a HUD running to give you an idea of what other players styles are. It won't take long to pick up patterns on certain types of player and how to exploit them.


At low stakes games you will very typically see a lot of players with the stats:

VPIP: 48
PFR: 9
AF: 0.5

This is a fish that you will take a lot of money off in the long run. You raise up a ton of hands in position of them and they keep taking the worst of it, donating you a lot of small to medium sized pots.

To make it easier in future posts, instead of saying VPIP 48 PFR 9 AF 0.5 to describe a player you just say 48/9/0.4. Any poker player knows what you mean.



Someone mentioned they play full ring. I suggest you don't as your win rate will be much higher at 6max and you will be able to get more hands in. If you do want to stick with full ring then the VPIP and PFR numbers I posted above will need to be a little lower. Perhaps 16/13.


EDIT: 2nd part of the thread can be found HERE

[aaron1005]

Amazing stuff.

[GfoRce009]

Thanks a lot for this! And I will play 6 max in that case.

[Wakou]

TY for this, Margaret... Could you explain a little more detail what AF is, and how it is derived?

[lucky_scrote]

Aggression factor is a simple equation really.

It's (Raise% + Bet%) / Call%.

As you should notice, if your AF is less than 1, then you are calling more than you are raising and betting combined!


P.S if you never call, so your call % is 0 then it will mean dividing by zero...

[TylerStroud]

Sticky this shit. 10/10 thread.

[ongame player]

concerning VPIP and PFR:
A general rule of thumb that I often see is that your PFR should be at least above VPIP/2.
This means that you are raising at least half the times you are putting money in the pot pf.

[cayton]

Ive never thought much about using things like h/manager or p/tracker before. so i was wondering, How many of this forum use one of the above and has it improved your game? Also these stats you are talking about. Do the HM OR PT just give you stats for yourself or for players you play against? I.E when you go to a table does it show you there stats?

[ongame player]

The 'HUD' that lucky scrote mentioned is a tool that shows the stats you want at the table where you are playing: stats are shown for you and for all your opponents. The tool is integrated with HM and in pt (at least, in pt3, if you use pt2 you need a seperate hud).
It is a very, very usefull tool.

[rfph1]

Voluntarily put money into pot.

An optimum amount of hands to play preflop in a 6max game is approx 18-25% depending on experience, stakes and standard of play. If players are worse, then you can generally get away with playing more hands preflop as people 3-bet you with only premium hands. The more hands you play, the harder post flop play becomes therefore you require experience to play a bit looser.

Ok, this I dont quite understand - in a 6 max game you must put money in 2/6 times as the SB/BB, so that equals 33%.

So, are we talking 18-25% of the 4 non-blind hands, or 18-25% of 5 hands (i.e. you exclude the BB)?

Im not sure what my VPIP is, but it feels like I play about 3 out of 5 hands per round in a 5 player STT = VPIP of 60% or 50% if I exclude the BB.

Does the 18-25% apply to all games or just cash ? I dont think Im a fish !