Finding Leaks Using Your Poker Database

Save for Later

If you play anything more than a tiny amount of online poker, you should be using either Holdem Manager 2 or PokerTracker 4 to track your play, save your hand histories and review your performance. Thats pretty much the bottom line – you’re giving up an incredible amount of EV if you’re not doing so. It’s absolutely true that some top players don’t use a HUD, but don’t be fooled – they’re playing in smaller player pools where they know their opponents’ games so well that they don’t really even need stats.

We all have these tools at our disposal, but so few of us use them regularly or effectively. With that in mind, how do we ensure we’re getting the most out of these programs, and learning everything we possibly can about our own game? The answer is the same as it is with so many other things – with hard work, positive habits and consistent small steps of progress.  Here are a few effective ways to use HM2 or PT4 to correct flaws in your poker game.

EVbb/100 is everything

When analysing your performance over a large sample of hands – and I do mean large, as in probably 50,000 hands or more, because any smaller sample will be significantly affected by variance – one number rules them all. Your EVbb/100 stat (Expected Value in big blinds per 100 hands in HM2, known as All-in Adjusted BB per 100 in PT4) is the most direct representation of your poker skill that you’ll find.

It’s significantly more useful than your ROI, because it ignores times where you simply ran hot towards the end of a tournament and binked a big score as a result. It just counts the chips you win and lose, and ignores all-in variance – a simple, reliable metric for success. The only instance where it isn’t reliable is in the case of ICM decisions, where a +cEV play might not be a +$EV play, or perhaps in a bounty tournament where -cEV decisions are necessary in order to pick up bounties.

Otherwise, EVbb/100 is so reliable that – with the exception of hands taking place in the blinds, where we ‘lose chips’ by giving up the blinds when we fold – we can say with a high degree of confidence that if this number is below zero over a reasonable sample of hands for a specific situation, we’ve found a leak. There are some instances where if we’re trying to play perfect GTO poker, we will need the weakest hands in our range to be losing money in order for our range to profit overall, but generally we want every hand we play to be profitable for the most part.

If you discover your winrate when opening suited connectors in early position is -45 EVbb/100, you’re losing 0.45bb every time you open one of those hands in that spot. This is significantly worse than folding and only losing your ante (if there was one), so your winrate would improve immediately if you simply folded preflop instead! Leak found, and leak plugged, at least in the short term.

Always account for context

I mentioned above that playing in the SB and BB are an exception to the rules, but they’re not really. They’re just an exception to the rule that we need better than zero EV in order to be profitable. Folding the BB or SB ‘loses’ 1bb or 0.5bb according to HM2 and PT4 since they measure from the start of the hand, so when you add the ante, folding the BB to a raise is about -110 EVbb/100, with any hand.

All we need in order for calling the raise to be profitable in relation to our other options (folding or 3-betting) is to lose at a slower rate, so if we ignored the context and only wanted to defend hands that have a positive EV individually, our winrate in the BB would go down once we start folding more. Context helps us compare the option we’re currently analysing to all the others on the table. We can’t know our best option if we don’t know our alternatives.

Similarly, when we filter for certain situations or specific statistics, we can’t always know what a ‘good’ statistic is – for example, is it better to have a ‘went to showdown’ statistic of 46% or 52%? It depends largely on our other stats, and the rest of our game.

If we don’t have reliable information to hand about what we should be aiming for with a specific statistic, we can’t make a value judgment about the quality of our play, so we need to hold off on evaluation until either more information is available, or we can compare the EVbb/100 of one playing style with another over a large sample of hands.

Start macro, finish micro

When you sit down to review your performance (ideally on a monthly or quarterly basis, depending on how often you play), it’s important not to be haphazard in the way you go about things. It’s not enough to just spend 15 minutes checking that your EV is above zero and your 3-bet bluffs are profitable – you have to “go deeper”, to quote a certain well-known movie.

There are a number of macro-level stats that might be useful in tracking your game – things like VPIP/PFR/3-bet, Aggression Factor, C-bet %, and plenty more. But these are just the bigger picture, and if you have a big enough sample, the real gold lies in the detail. If you cross-examine your stats and hold them up to a microscope, you might find that the bigger picture masks a huge weakness that doesn’t reveal itself until you run it through multiple filters and reports.

As an example, I worked with a student some time ago whose biggest weakness was calling 3-bets, but this wasn’t reflected in the macro numbers. The macro numbers reflected that he was folding to 3-bets around 47% of the time, a very reasonable number; in fact, when we dissected those stats and looked at the reality, he was folding to 3-bets far too often at short stacks (i.e. not calling enough all-in reshoves), and almost never folding at deeper stacks, resulting in huge losses with hands like 22, T7s, A9o and K5s. We discovered two leaks at once, by isolating something that didn’t even look like a problem, and confining it to specific sets of different circumstances.

Track your development

Finally, whatever you do to improve your game via leakfinding, you need to be tracking your progress. This should go without saying, but if you don’t know where you were at before, you don’t know how far you’ve come, and if you don’t know where you are now, you don’t know how far you have left to go.
Whether by taking notes or filtering your database for previous performance, you need to be aware of how the changes you’re implementing are settling into your game, and one of the biggest boosts to your confidence will be knowing that you’re better than you were before. After all, while being a poker player means competing with others on a regular basis, your biggest and most important competition is with yourself.