had assumed that the PT autorates were of much less significance in the GT+/PV era, but following feedback from fellow players and some other discussions about them, I thought I should try to update them and focus them more on day to day use at the tables.

edit - been working all weekend on a modified set - fixed a big issue in the original ones with 'false agrressives..also added in weak-tight and a modified'showdown muppet' - see discussion with ap10 below (although by mod 5 the WT doesn't indicate good players with high W$SD, just those who are weak-tight generally)

anyway current testing set of rules is here

http://www.andymcnish.btinternet.co.uk/NL50mod6.TXT


(You can save them as a text file to your desktop and then import them direct into PT)[/b]
I have bitten the bullet and decided to drop pre-flop raise% as an indicator.
This is because
a) it doens't tell us much about an opponent's likely win/loss rate
b) if you need to try to figure out likely holdings for a pre-flop raiser or limper you will look at the actual PFR% - remembering which icon means above or below 7% doesn't do a lot of good - you still need to glance at the stats to see if it's 0% or 6 (or 7% or 25%)
c) it frees up more icons - allowing me to split post-flop aggression into passive/neutral and aggressive and still reducing the overall number - making those left simpler to remember (while still being good guides to expected win/loss rates) and lets me add some really useful priority categories.

The 9 basic categories are now as follows:

Loose Passive (fish)
Slightly Loose Passive (mini-fish)
Tight Passive (Rock)

Loose Neutral
Slightly Loose Neutral (Vanilla)
Tight Neutral

Loose Aggressive
Slightly Loose Aggressive
Tight Aggressive

I have balanced the categories from the data in my $50 and $100 NL database.
This means that there are roughly equal nos. of players categorised as Tight,Slightly Loose and Loose and again a more or less equal balance between Passive/Neutral/Aggressive. It also mean that no one category represents more than 15% or less than 4% of all rated players)

As my old categories were based on $25 NL you would expect me to have to to tighten the ratings up a bit pre-flop and I have. They are for fullish Ring tables (7-10 players) - I don't rate hands with less than 7 players dealt in.

The new guidlelines are:
Tight <20% Vp$iP
Slightly Loose 20-35
Loose >35%

For Passive/Aggressive/Neutral
Passive <1.2 PFA
Neutral 1.2-2.2
Aggressive >2.2

Now for the priority categories.

1. Xtra-loose (XL) - 60% Vp$iP or more (these are just cash machines irrespective of style). This is priority 1.

2. Calling Station (CS). The old favorite and still as useful as ever. Non-Tight, Passive and with a WtSD% when saw flop of > 35% . Priority 2.

3. The last priority category is a warning signal rather than a fish finder. It's the Ultra-Aggressive (icon is exclamation mark).
Anyone with a post-flop aggression of 6 or more gets this rating. These guys will push hard (and they are often big winners). They will always bet out if checked to on the flop and like raising. Stay out of their way unless you have a hand you are prepared to slowplay or push back with. You should also check their WtSD$% to see how likely they are to lay down to a re-raise or if bet at. It's also a priority 3 category.


Anyway that completes the new rules.

On my database I get the following results for each category:

category name/% of players /win/lossBB/100

LP/8%/-11
sLP/12%/-6
TP/12%/-3

LN/10%/-4
sLN/12%/-1
TN/5%/+4

LA/8%/-1
sLA/11%/+2%
TA/6%/+7.4

XL/6%/-32 (!)
CS/5%/-17
UA/5%/+6


Everything more or less .as expected which is a good sign.



If the feedback is good then I will amend the posted rules on the PT Guides.

I will go thru what they all mean tomorrow..

Excession,

I like your thoughts and oddly enough, I posted a question to you in the other thread regarding that PFR line. I agree that the PFR% probably isnt the best of indicators. Is 6% that much different from 7%? It would be nice if we had more than 14 cats so that the PFR% could be divided more correctly.

I really like your method and if I am calculating correctly, you still have 2 auto rate icons that can be used. I HIGHLY suggest using 2 categories that I came up with and have been, quite possibly, the two most important categories to me.

1. Loser
WTSD% >= 25
AND
W%SD between 1% and 40%

2. Weak Tight
WTSD% <= 18
AND
W$SD between 65% and 99%

These numbers were decided sorta arbitrarily and havent been refined. I can not reiterate enough how important both of these categories have become to myself. I would be willing to optimize these #'s if you were interesting in adding them to your rules.

I would then prioritize the auto rate icons as follows:

1. Loser
2. Weak tight
3. Ultra Loose
4. Calling Station
5. Ultra Aggressive
The rest...

This isnt quite as important but I am not a big fan of your icon selections

Players we like to have at our table are indicated by a frown. IMHO this should be a smiley. I'm happy to see these players around. On the other hand, I would put the frown with a category of players I do not like to have at my table. The smiley & frown fit perfectly for both of my categories that I suggest using. Loser = Smiley, Frown = Weak Tight But then again, I might be the backwards one...

I would then assign the bomb to X-loose, the exclamation mark to Ultra-aggressor and the mouse to Loose Neutral (LN).

I will run both your rules and my suggestions against my database and post the results....

I just had my laptop tank on me with my entire PT data in it. As my wife said....but honey, dont you backup??? I will put the new guidelines in and let you know how I fare. As for Aperfect10's suggestion, ill give it a try too.

sonicboom
Hell yeah im tilting!!

ah I use the bomb icon as the ultra-aggressive, not triangle as stated above...

AP10- I will take the word of anyone who plays 15,000+ hands/week as to what is useful in practice

Weak-tight

The reason that I have never used W$SD as a rating aid is that it is a SD stat which is also luck-dependent, These two factors seem to me to suggest that it will take ages to settle down.
I can see why you need a second stat like W$SD or similar though as otherwise you can't sort out the players who are weak-tight from those chasing every draw down to the river and then and who then fold on the end (although you could use fold to river bet, or looseness and passivity to weed out the latter maybe?)

Unfortunately at present you can't rate certain categories only after X hands otherwise I would have tried something along these lines before and rated theese sorts of stats after say 50-100 hands..


As for prioritising it it looks like a rank 2 one to me - Extra-Loose players (priority1), Ultra-Aggressives and CS (P3&4) shouldn't take many out of this category.


Loser
I find this more problematical as it seems likely to to clash a lot with calling station - CS call down to the SD too much and lose big because of it. The difference is that I have CS set up at 35%+ WtSD - so if you rated this in priority after CS it would what this would show are those players who call down a little more than average (25-35%) and either time it badly (or get unlucky). Do you still use CS as a category and if so how do they interact?


The other reason why I've shied away from using stats like these is that these categories will always show big losses on analysis as that is how each is defined - but you can't see how bad the players really are or how much it's luck dependent. One way might be to track all those players who are rated 'loser' or 'weak-tight' on iniitial rating and see what those specific players are are rated at 50, 100,250 etc and how they average BB/100 of those players has changed..
I wonder if you can make stats like this work for you because you play such long hours and 8 table - so you have a lot of hands in your DB for most players?

You would be extremely surprised at the rate that these numbers settle down. Much like that one users skepticism in the other thread regarding PFA and such a low sample; your skeptisism is a valid concern.

Losers show a large net loss while Weak tight's show a large net profit.

I guess this goes back to how quickly the stats settle down but it is still extremely important to me and I am not so sure that my larger database makes a big difference.

Think about this...

Loser
W$SD between 1% and 40%

I used 1% as the bottom limit rather than zero so that players are not unfairly categorized by a bad break. They would need to take 2 bad breaks within 3 showdowns to get them into this category. 3 bad breaks in 4 showdowns, etc. I have yet to see a player unfairly categorized and if they are its only for a few short hands...

The same can be said for weak tight.
W$SD between 65 and 99%

I chose the 99% ceiling for the exact same reasons as above. Once again, players arent unfairly categorized too frequently.

Your skepticism is valid; however, I think once I post my results and you try these additions you will soon realize how important and accurate they truly are...

Woohoo...as I finish typing this I just finished autorated 15,170 players which took over 30 minutes to rate! This is on a 3.8GHz HT machine with 2GB ram!!!! I probably will not be able to run my additions until later tonight...

Trust me I want to get them in - it's worth some testing to get the best autorates we can


OK I have put i weak-tight as no2 priority (after XL). I'm only getting 3% of players in that category after 20 hands but it does rise to 6% after 100 *of course I would expect it to as they are winning ) by 8-10BB/100.

I will play with it for a while but it loks good at the mo

Using Excessions proposed auto rate rules...

category name | % of players | PTBB/100

LP | 8.8% | -15.75
sLP | 9.7% | -8.34
TP | 7.9% | -2.29

LN | 12.0% | -7.72
sLN | 11.8% 0.03
TN | 4.4% | 2.69

LA | 8.9% | -2.13
sLA | 11.7% | 4.19
TA | 6.0% | 3.58

XL | 8.3% | -32.56
CS | 5.4% | -15.82
UA | 5.1% | 5.03

I'm a math/computer geek so sometimes my posts may not be as clear as they are in my brain Bear with me....

The reason I added these two categories is because no matter which category type you fall into if you are going to showdown frequently and losing, you will never make any money. These players deserve their own rating IMHO because while they may be tight, loose, passive or aggressive they will lose money.

The same can be said for weak tight. I've seen LA who go to showdown infrequently and win often and be extremely profitable. Simply letting them in the LAG cat wasnt meeting my needs due to the simple fact that when I look at an icon I like to know if they are a winner, loser or break even player.

Loser does tend to cut into the calling station category and losers tend to call you down. Thats the nature of the beast. There are also a lot of LA or UA that become overaggressive and end up going to showdown too frequently and loose money. I've also seen TAG's fall into this category as well...

Weak tight players tend to cut into the old TPA and TPP although there is a very good mixture across the board. This is the ONLY player category that I end up a small loser to over time. I am profitable against every other player type.

All in all, while these two cats might cut into one player type more than another they are fairly even spread across the board...

Looks good - very close to my DB
How many hands you rating after?



I note that sLA is marginally better than TA - this accords with my own experience that the optimal Vp%iP is more like 25-30 than 15-20 in games as loose and poor as these.. of course you have to trade off optimising BB/100 on one table by playing the marginals well against just playing more core hands at extra tables instead.

so you think that losers should rank before CS or after (if before they might even make CS a winning category!

Ok, after further thought, you are correct. The priority rankings should be...

1. XL
2. CS
3. Loser
4. WT
5. UA

I ran the auto rate on my database and got this. I'm excited to find time to run this against your original suggestion to compare. Overall I think everything looks great with these new additions.

Excessions proposed auto rate rules:


Excessions proposed auto rate rules with my additions:


A copy of these modified auto rate rules can be downloaded so that you can easily swap between the two. I also modified the icons to what makes sense to me

Looking at these numbers I notice that the dropout rate of the Loser is not nearly as bad as the XL and CS. I think this proves the point that this is a needed category. Ultra aggressor's become less profitable the more hands they play. I am assuming this is because people catch on to their over aggressiveness and do not get pushed off as easy.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. When I get time, I'll create a graph like this for your auto rate rules without my additions. So far though, I like the look of things! Btw, Excession, check your inbox, I sent you a private message.

I am having a problem. Since I downloaded the new rules PT is not autorating.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

cat923