Part 4 of PT guide - trying to categorise various types of 25c/50c NL player and suggest strategies to use against them - now up on main page..


cheers

Wonderful guid/website.. Hope the Party players don't find it

Just got round to reading parts 3 and 4 excession - really excellent articles and one or two ideas I might use to refine my personal PT use. Going to try to free up the forthcoming empire reload bonus playing 25NL and pick up another coupla hundred whilst i do it, and giving GT+ a go for the first time too (I have previously used the GT live window instead, which is rather cumbersome).

One point I would make that you fail to mention in your article about the post-flop statistics; because the only decision each player makes every hand is whether to put money in the pot, VPIP/PFR% are a good indication of preflop looseness and aggression within maybe 15 or 20 hands worth of data. Figures like Went to showdown % that come into play AFTER the flop can be very misleading if you happen to be playing someone you only have 20 or 30 hands of data on. In that time, they may have only seen 5 or 6 flops and a disproportionate number of good or bad cards could lead to very misleading post-flop figures. I would think those figures are potentially misleading without a lot of data on individual players' actions postflop. I'd like to see a player taking at least 15-20 flops before I put much stock in their accuracy.

Great guides though, I will comb through them again later this week when I'm freeing up my bonus!

Monk
xxxxx

Felonius - excellent point about the post-flop stats.

You need to be careful with early reads on these (especially on the WtSD%).

The PFA settles fairly quicky. If they see 33% of flops, once they have played 30 hands you have seen 10 examples of post-flop play - you can usually get enough of a tell on post-flop aggression or passivity with that to be useful (after all any indicative data is better than none so long as you don't use it as an excuse to make bad plays). The only times you really change your play significantly is if PFA is >3 or <1 so you do have a big margin for variation.
Of course occasionally it's just someone on a rush but once given icons change far less often than you would think.

The exception is the Calling Station icon and you have put your finger on why - WtSD takes longer to settle in and is more dependent on luck and table texture than the other stats. You will need to be very careful using WtSD under say 60 hands for sure (but if you see the indicative looseness and passivity pre and post flop with a high WtSD number you know at least he's a bad player - it's just a question of what sort of bad player