Poker Corner

A few weeks ago I wrote a column about bad beats and included my own tale of woe. I claimed that only running fives could have beaten me (I won't waste your time repeating the gory details), but a number of astute readers (a tip of the hat to Nick) pointed out that my opponent could've also won with a runner-runner straight. This bothered me, because I remembered the hand in too-vivid detail and I would've noticed if there had been other ways for the guy to beat me. So I went back and replayed the hand, and saw that I'd misremembered the flop. I wrote that the flop came Q-7-2, when in fact it came Q-10-7. So I was right, the only way he could've beaten me was with running fives. Though we might've chopped the pot if we both made a Broadway straight. So, I was "mostly" right, which by today's standards of journalistic ethics is the same as "exactly" right.

Now, you may be wondering what I mean when I say that I "replayed" the hand. No, I don't videotape my online play, nor do I scribble down the particulars of every play like the nerdy chess geeks who used to kick my ass in junior high school. No, I use a program called PokerTracker (which you can find at www.pokertracker.com), which, once you try it, will change forever the way you play online.

PokerTracker is a program that allows you to analyze every single hand you play. You download your hand histories into the database (the program now does this automatically for most sites), and then the fun begins. With PokerTracker you can take the data from your hands and examine it in extraordinary detail. Every poker players should keep track of how they do in every session, and PokerTracker does this automatically, breaking down your wins and losses by session, by week, or by limit.

It's when you start analyzing your play that PokerTracker can become downright addictive. The program can tell you how much money you made playing every possible hand combination. It tells you how often you voluntarily put money in the pot (an important indicator of how tight/loose you play). It tells you how much you've won/lost playing in early, middle, or late position. And the data can quickly and easily be sorted in the database, so if you want to see which ten starting hands have cost you the most money on average when you play them, it's just a single mouse click.

One feature that will occupy much of your time at the start is Replay, where you can select a particular hand and a pop-up of an online poker table (very similar to the ones you see when you play) appears and runs through the hand. If you lose a hand to a player who doesn't reveal his hand at the showdown, most hand histories do include those hole cards, and so replay can give you some important information about how your opponent plays.

And that is where PokerTracker's real power comes into play. Because when you download a hand history, it's not just your hands you get information on, but the hands everyone at your table plays. PokerTracker takes that data and builds up profiles of your opponents the same as it does for you. Meaning you can take that information and analyze THEIR play the same as your own. The amount of data PokerTracker gathers is truly astounding, and as the old saying goes, "Knowledge is Power". And that's absolutely true at the poker table. It's also true that players online don't reveal the physical tells that smart players can pick up when you're sitting face-to-face, but you also don't have a handy statistical analysis of the last 1,000 hands the guy played.

So you have this mass of information—great. But how do you make use of it? It's impractical to toggle back and forth between your game and the database, searching for a particular player and trying to build a profile. Well, you don't need to. It's almost as easy to upload information from PokerTracker to your favorite poker site as it is to download hand histories, and then programs such as PlayerViewNet, GameTime+ and PokerAce take that information and display it on the screen. If you sit down and a player you have information on is seated next to you, around that player's name plate you'll see tiny boxes filled with numbers, telling you what percentage of hands he plays, how often he raises, how often he check-raises…you can select precisely what information you think is most important.

Think about how big an advantage this would give you. You're at a table with eight players who have no idea how you play—and you know EXACTLY how they play. Perhaps the player two seats to your right raises about as often as Antoine Walker gives up an open look at a three. If he does pop it up, you can fold your AQ without a second thought, knowing you're most likely crushed. If the numbers tell you that the two players to your left are giggling maniacs you can limp with some big hands knowing you'll likely get raised and giving you a chance to three-bet. The information you've collected gives you a far better chance to play optimal (and profitable) poker.

Just understand one thing—just as you have information on your opponents, they may have information on YOU. Many high-limit online players keep their computers logged on to their poker sites of choice all day, even if they aren't playing, with eight, ten, or twelve tables open. What they're doing is "mining" the tables, gobbling up huge amounts of data on hundreds of different players, swelling the database with hundreds of thousands of hands.

And here's something else what you can do with all that data—you can use PokerTracker to identify especially fishy players, "tag" those players on the "Buddy" lists that most sites provide, and search them out when you sit down to play. One bad player can make an iffy game into a profitable one, and if you can easily and quickly identify an online table practically schooling with fish it can make a major difference in your win rate. This is worth keeping in mind if you notice strange behavior when you sit down at a short-handed table—if suddenly all the seats fill up and the players' names seem oddly familiar and they happily greet you in the chat box and ask after your health with genuine concern…you might be on a few Buddy lists. And you might want to go back to PokerTracker to look for some leaks in your game.

I haven't come close to explaining all that PokerTracker can do, because to do so would take a book. And I mean this literally—two expert players who are also among the most respected online poker writers did just that, writing the PokerTracker Guide (which can be found at, you guessed it, www.pokertrackerguide.com). The Guide is an indispensable resource for exploiting all the features PokerTracker offers, many of which aren't easy to figure out on your own. The book can help you turn PokerTracker from an amusing toy into an invaluable tool.

Invaluable tools, however, aren't free. You can download a test version of PokerTracker that lets you store a few thousand hands, but the full, unlimited version costs $55. The PokerTracker Guide costs $20 and can be downloaded directly from the website. One way to justify the expense is to think of it as an investment in your game—an investment with the potential to provide excellent returns for years and years to come. Poker is a game of partial information, but these aids can help you fill in enough of the blanks to make a real difference.