Hi Guys,

here's something I'm sometimes wondering about: most of us declare ourselves a winner on a certain level, or say that we can beat a certain game if, over a long enough period/number of hands, our winrate is good. There's discussion about how good it can/should be, but let's leave that aside for the moment.

I'm wondering however, whether you could somehow analyse what part of your winrate is due to the fact that you practice good table selection, follow your favorite fish around, find a lot of weekend drunks and what more, and what part is due to solid grinding against the other regulars. I'm thinking in analogy with chess, where you have a rating system which (more or less objectively) tells you how strong of a player you are. Beating a very weak player doesn't add much to your rating, while beating stronger ones does.

However, our winrate is heavily biased towards how we perform against weaker players (at least at the lower levels), because they tend to make the biggest mistakes for the largests amounts of money. Even moreso when we actively follow them around and try to stay away from solid players. So, playing a lot of weak players adds a lot to our winrate but, intuitively, doesn't tell us that much about how strong we really are.

So, to which extent does winrate tell you how strong you are, and to which extent does it tell you how good you are at finding weaker players and exploiting them? (I know, they're not completely unrelated, but still there is a difference?)

I often feel (especially now I'm playing the $200NL on UB) that, while I can be a winning player there, I would have a hard time sitting at a table with 4 or 5 of the stronger regulars there.

In PT, you can see how you fare against specific players under the MISC STATS tab in the 3rd window. You can look at your results based on time-of-day and day-of-week under the Session notes tab "More Detail".

If you're selecting very good tables and stacking donks, you can see that under the misc stats tab you'll see where you're winning/losing most of your money - donks or regulars. Winrate also isn't everything, because some of us play extra tables to sacrifice winrate /100 hands, but boost winrate/HOUR. Also, a good player playing just one table can easily have winrates in the dbl digits (presumably, even if they're playing MAYBE up to 4 tables).

Just like all poker, IT DEPENDS is king, and there's so much to concepts like 'good player' 'winning player' that it's hard to really deconstruct them. But, I think my post should get you started.

Ahhh ok

By 'not one single long term winner over me so far' do you mean that there's nobody in your DB who is up money vs you over a significant amount of hands? Or that nobody has a better winrate than you? Because I'm pretty sure SOMEONE has to have run good vs you and be a winner against you, and also that there are others with better winrates at 200 NL than you too.

Back on topic though, I agree that table selection is extremely important and generally underrated.