Friday, May 13, 2005

PokerTracker - looks like a great tool

In my preliminary research for the Shorthanded Limit Hold'em book, I've started to use Poker Tracker. I had heard so much about it, and it seems many people refer to their stats (as well as other players) from Poker Tracker.

It took me some time to figure things out. Downloading hands seemed such a pain in the beginning. But with some suggestions here and there, and fiddling with the software and the poker sites, it is now a breeze. The stats are interesting, but I still need to get used to what they mean. One of the problems will be filtering out different number of people at the table. I played heads-up and in a 3 person game for maybe 30% of my current data (only 1300 hands so far), so the stats make me look like a raising machine, yet with a healthy win rate. With more hands, I'll be able to filter out how many hands it is per table to compare the differences.

Even if I do use PT for a while, I don't think I'll get that many hands in. At least not enough to put together meaningful data. So I'll still need to search out players who are willing to contribute their data. Maybe in exchange, I can give them the results of all the data combined earlier than the release of the book - and give them a complimentary copy of the book too. Well, we'll see how that goes when the time comes.

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