by growlers » Mon Aug 07, 2006 6:25 pm
Not to bump an old thread, but I'm new here and thought maybe I could give a tiny bit of insight since you didn't get much responses.
Before I make a comment about PT stats, I will say that there is more than one way to play poker and while there are clearly "incorrect numbers" (i.e. a VPIP of 80% is clearly a loser), there is no "correct number" for each player. You should also never try to play to adjust your stats - i see people doing this - work on one part of your game like value betting and your number will naturally get better as you improve.
With that said, there are two things I think I can identify:
The first one is easy - your river AF is pretty low. You are a tight player with that VPIP and you rate to have better hands more often than a player with say a VPIP 25%. I can almost guarentee you are missing value bets on the river by checking so much.
This is a very difficult aspect of limit poker and I think one of the hardest to learn - I think about this constantly and still miss them.
The other issue is a bit more controversal - you are pretty damn tight. You have proved that you can be a winning player at this VPIP and maybe you are more comfortable, but you should experiment with opening up your game a little. A VPIP of 20% can sustain a very nice win rate as long as you play postflop well. I'm not saying you should strive for that VPIP, what I am suggesting is move down a level or so and experiment with opening up your game. You probably have your blinds stolen quite a bit and may want to defend a little more to keep the sharks at bay. Every 10K hands look at your WSD% - you are at 54% now - if you can open up and keep this above 50% you will be making a bigger bb/100 and more money overall but lose slightly more pots. My VPIP at 2-4 stars (maybe close to 5-10 party in skill level) is 20.5% but my WSD is stil 52%, for instance.
The flip side to this is that it is probably easy to multitable at this VPIP so if you just want to make money and not improve your game as much, there are many people that accept a lower win rate to be able to multitable, reduce their variance, and make money.
But if you ever play live with this VPIP people will very quiclky notice and you will get eaten alive, so if you planning on playing live you might want to "practice" opening up more online.
Just some thoughts, anyone beating 5/10 is a pretty good player, so don't take any of this personally.
