Using Your Holdem Manager for Ultimate Domination

I have felt it and I know you have too.  There's that one guy who you know, you just KNOW has been 3-betting you light and stealing your blinds more often than your HUD would lead you to believe.  This of course brings us to the inherent flaw of using one: it can only give us average statistics, and quite often says little, if anything, about how a foe is playing against you in particular.  But what if we could just take a little extra time to dig a little bit deeper into our database to find out the exact answers to these otherwise simple little questions?

Thus began my quest to find such answers.  Don't get me wrong.  Although I have railed against using a HUD in the past, I have since jumped this hurdle as I began to realize that using one is not something you do, but rather, something that you learn.  Helpful as they are, I was still craving these answers and knew that I could never be EXCELLENT as a shortstacker until I found it out.  Many people are reading this and surely believing that you can just tweak the filters and voila, there you have it.  Nope.  The "Vs Player" filter will only give you basic information such as total winnings and show you hands where said player is sitting at the same table as you.  Even if you try to get clever and filter it further for only hands where the action was unopened and you raised on the button and the big blind 3-bet you, the first thing that you will likely see when you replay a hand is that the villain you were looking to get a read on had already exited the hand.

I tried posting on forums, collaborating with confidants, and even writing to the actual programmers to find out how to do this.  Perhaps I was not explicit enough in that I was looking for actual percentages, but I got the same information over and over. It was simply not functional and led me to the same dead end.

Then the news broke on Pokertableratings about the 40putts/Kinetica/Littlezen shortstacker softplaying scandal.  A member of the esteemed DeucesCracked training site playing under the name NoahSD had taken extensive time to write a long and detailed report using statistical analysis to break down the 3-bet ranges of these players when playing against each other.  Aha!  So there is somebody out there who actually knows how to do this!

I thought for a while on how best to get this information from him, but then just decided to simply ask.  Lo and behold, in less than an hour's time, here is what he replied:

Hi Lorin,
Unfortunately HM isn't really designed to do this. I've been told that they plan to eventually add the stat "Player A's 3-bet % vs. Player B", but I think it's likely to be far in the future.

I used custom software to get my own answers, and frankly I have no idea how it works.  The only way I know how to do this without hiring a programmer to do it for you is with this tedious method:

To get Player A's 3-bet % vs. Player B:

1) Select player B in HM.
2) In the filter menu, go to more filters and add "PFR = True".
3) Run the report.
4) In the bottom half of HM, select the "All" radio button next to "last 500". Right click and select "export all hands to hard drive" and choose a spot to export those hands.
5) Options -> Database Management. Create a new database.
6) Import the hands that you exported into that database. This is a database of all hands where player B raised preflop.
7) Select Player A and run a report with no filter. The 3-bet % that the report shows is Player A's 3-bet % when Player B raised.

If you make a database with all the hands where you raised preflop, you should be able to quickly look at the 3-bet %s that various players have against you.

Hope that helps,
Noah


This was just awesome to me.  Though he might consider this tedious (and technically it is), I am no stranger to tedious work as I have spent countless hours running simulations using Stox EV that could often top 5 minutes for just a single, detailed run.  So what is one to do with such information?

Use it to completely dominate and control your opposition.

That statement being rather vague, I will give an example using a player whom we will term "KaySmash" to show you just how we can put this into practice.  On the HUD, it says that KaySmash opens the button 44% of the time.  I filtered out all hands where I was on the big blind.  Then I created a new database per the instructions and when I loaded it up, I set my filters to "Unopened" and "Button" and set it to run the report against KaySmash.  True to form, he actually was raising that frequency.  All that victimization was just a figment of my imagination!  More importantly, I can now see that he is folding to my 3-bet 44% of the time.  Since I am now armed with the information that he is not attempting to exploit my folding tendencies and just playing by a script, I can hereby assume that he will be treating me no differently when I am in the small blind as well.

While this information is excellent, it allows to me play a perfect shove or fold game against him, but doesn't really allow for much room for true exploitation since he is calling rather frequently.  So digging a little deeper, I then follow NoahSD's plan to find out how often KaySmash is 3-betting me by filtering out the hands where I raise the button and then running the report with KaySmash in the big blind and the small blind has declined to enter the pot.  Here is where it gets really interesting.

KaySmash is 3-betting me approximately 18% of the time, and never, ever just flat calling.  Though I was quite sure of this, since I am dealing with a rotating base of players on any single day, it is often easy to confuse them.  The fact that he is unwilling to get tricky makes him extraordinarily easy to beat.

I will give you guys a chance to digest this information for a few days and then in the next post I will show you precisely how we can use this information for an optimal strategy against this particular opponent.

Peace!

The Law of Unintended Consequences

We see this everywhere. A smoking ban in bars leads to more drunk driving deaths when people drive further to get to bar that has heated outdoor smoking areas. Obama's "Cash for Clunkers" program hurts the Demolition Derby sport by causing a drought of old vehicles that now going straight to the junkyard. Why should we care? Because all players who are upset by the short stack epidemic are witnessing this happening right now. The culprit? A powerful new generation of poker software that we all love and enjoy.

Many people have suggested that we raise the minimum buy in. I would like to point out, though, that the minimum buy in has always been 20BB pretty much across the board. Yet if you peel the layers back a little further, you will see that there only exists a short stack swarm at sites where the newer highly advanced HUD's are not only rampant, but encouraged. After all, the 20BB minimum buy in exists at the Cake Poker network as well, yet there are very few short stackers who exist there and none of them are particularly dangerous...because of the site wide ban on this software.

The highly detailed HUD's available through HEM and PT3 et al. paved the way for short stackers who can now slice through you with razor thin margins because of a huge list of very specific stats that can track your patterns of play from every single position at the table and can feed this information into advanced simulators on their free time like StoxEV that can measure their expected value down to the PENNY. Even if a player has never logged any hands against you, they can still purchase hand histories by the million and have a complete profile against you as soon as they wake up at noon.

So is this new generation of software aids the true danger to the game? I would wager a "yes" here. Even Kyle "Cottonseed" Hendon made a remark in one of his videos on Stox Poker that the HEM HUD is so good that it is almost like cheating. While the lines have blurred tremendously since their inception, it is certainly quickly reaching that point. Had you explained to an old time pro back in 1999 what people were doing now to the game they almost certainly would have called it such.

Week 2 With No HUD....Another $3,000

There are two brand new things to note about this week's results. The first is that I had a brief and unsuccessful venture in $2/4 where everything possible went wrong. Surprisingly, not once did I get in pre-flop less than a coin flip. Being that I have been short stack crushing $1/2 so hard and getting comfortable doing so, I decided that making the instant jump was adding on a level of stress that was not necessary at this point, so I have decided to just sprinkle in a few good $2/4 games here and there until I make the total transition.

The second point is that you will notice that I have decided that I will not be covering up my pre-flop stats anymore, for two good reasons. The first is that I want to shock and appall everyone with how tight I am yet still able to win at the rate of a strong, successful full stacker. In fact, Poker Listings currently has me ranked as the 50th tightest player in the world, a badge that I wear with honor.

The second reason I do this is because I am no longer concerned that anyone can read these stats and steal my game plan. Great short stack play is not a pre-flop shoving contest. It is about staying ahead of your opponents' ranges, finding +EV spots and risking your buy-in to grab them, and making the optimal plays post-flop.

In my next post, I will be introducing a revolutionary concept called the "Range Map" and how that ties in with what I call "Proper Play Theory." The range map is a term I am coining that allows me to consistently beat completely unknown players without the use of any prior statistics or knowledge of them. This is a concept that applies to both live and online play and is adaptable to changes in the future flow of the game and will thus always be relevant.

My First Week Without the HUD

Although I am not afraid to admit when I am running good, it is simply hard to imagine how my results could have been any better with some shitty device telling me that I can not trust my own observations....

My Case Aginst Using a HUD

As of this past Sunday, after much self-deliberation, I have decided to fully abandon my HUD permanently. Although I do not doubt that there are a few select players out there who can actually put these things to work, my final analysis is that they do far more harm than good for the vast majority of online grinders. Here is my case against it.

First of all, it is important to acknowledge why we actually use a HUD. Here is why: to inform us to make decisions by the use of past player statistics that we would not otherwise make were that information not available. In this regard, it is like a live tell. After all, a tell is only significant when it causes us to take an action that we were not otherwise going to do had we not seen it.

So now that I have defined what a HUD does, let's examine the underlying logic here. In the course of my career, I have played roughly 2,000,000 hands of online poker. Although the overall quality of play has certainly increased in this time frame, one major truth has emerged: most players generally adapt to each other and take on the same tendencies. In other words, if one player open raises by mashing the pot button with his decent hands in early position, most others will be doing the same thing. Likewise, if one player is min-raise opening his marginal hands in late position, I can expect that others who are opening for the minimum in late position are also doing it with marginal hands. And one more, if one person is limp-reraising only premium hands from early position, it is pretty safe to say that others are doing the same thing, a.k.a., they are NOT doing this with hands like 66.

While I could go on and on with a plethora of examples, I would say that the concept is clear here: I don't need stats on players in order to decipher these basic meanings, and reading stats to try and get deeper here could only accomplish one possible thing- to obscure what is already obvious. Be these extreme examples as they may be, most everything else follows suit to some degree or another. Observation is the key. A 6x open raise from early position is virtually always a premium hand, whether it is coming from a 9/6 or 30/20. Period.

So now that I have established that certain tendencies are visible through lone observation, we must now address the logic of using a device over our own observations. Exactly how does this make sense? We are using stats that are, at best, only 30 days old or less. These stats do not capture a person's mood or whether or not they are adjusting to current table conditions or following the meta-game. Ask yourself this: is a player with an “Attempt to Steal” stat of 60% who was just 3-bet off his hand three times in a row still just a 60% ATS guy this time around, or an angry or clever player holding QQ and now HOPING he will get 3-bet again?

By attempting to use these stats rather than our own good judgment, these little nuances are missed. Is the player who runs a 30/20 a real maniac, or is he just some min-betting fool looking to take the initiative in a lot of cheap flops? This information is not clear on its own, but with good observation and note taking skills should be readily apparent.

So I know what you must be thinking. “I am playing so many tables that I just don't have the chance to get this information on my own.” Here is my retort: how can it possibly be beneficial to be piling on more and more tables in exchange for lousy or non-existent information? And that is only assuming that the information that we are getting is accurate! I still have not even addressed the most dangerous aspect of using a HUD. When the information initially loads up, often times it is not correctly lined up with the appropriate player and you are looking at stats that could belong to another player. Further into your session, you will also find that sometimes a player leaves or goes busto and another player promptly sits down and “inherits” the first player's stats. Even though this can be avoided by making sure the names line up, a single slip up has a high price. And how much “good” information is necessary to make up for that single time you stacked away on one bad misread?