My WSOP Dilemma and Why Postflop Stats Suck

(NB: I’ll go over the hands from my last blog in my next entry. I really wanted to talk about these things today.)

I have two weeks off for Easter now so that’s pretty sweet. I’ve got a couple of law assignments to do but other than that I should be pretty free to do whatever so I’m hoping to get in a good deal of hands and make some money to fund my Vegas trip. Speaking of Vegas, it looks like it’s definitely going ahead now. We’ve still got to sort of the specifics but it looks like there’ll be 9 of us (5 guys, 4 girls) heading to Vegas and New York for 10 and 5 days respectively. I’ve always wanted to go to New York so this really should be a pretty sick trip. The only thing I’m unsure of is (ironically) whether to play the Main Event. Initially that was the whole purpose of the trip, but I’m beginning to have second thoughts. I have these visions of spending day after day at the poker table, min-cashing for some irrelevant amount while my friends have the experiences and memories of a lifetime at the pool or at the nightclub or wherever. I did some research on the payouts for last year’s Main Event and realised that even if I made the top 200, I’d ‘only’ get $50,000. Sure, $40,000 profit is great, but is it really worth skipping five days in Vegas with your friends? That $40,000 isn’t going to change my life, and in 10 years it’ll be probably become completely insignificant, yet the chance to spend five days in Vegas as a 21 year old with your friends only comes once. Now I know in all likelihood I’ll bust on day 1 or day 2 and this won’t be an issue, but in some ways that makes it even worse. It becomes a no win situation; I either lose $10,000 or I lose precious time! Not a great deal if you ask me. Anyway, I’ll definitely ponder it some more in the coming weeks and I’ll let you guys know what I decide.

In other news I’m coming out of my downswing quite nicely. I’ve recovered 24K of the 37K I lost and have only played about 30 hours. I have to admit though I’m still struggling playing completely HUD-less. It’s definitely helped me in that it’s forced me to pay careful attention to my opponents and their tendencies but at the same time I’ve found that when I’m playing too many tables it can all get a bit too overwhelming, especially if I have too many iPoker or Party tables going (my reads are much worse on these sites as I’m new to iPoker and the players on Party can change their screen-names every month). I think what I might do is go with a ‘preflop only’ HUD; the only two stats I’ll have are VPIP and PFR and then in the popup I’ll just have 3-bet stats and nothing else. While I realise that preflop stats are much maligned and people often point to the fact that the difference between two players is not to be gauged by whether they’re 23/18 or 24/17, I do think that there is something to be said for knowing if someone’s 22/18 versus 18/14 versus 40/10; not only you can narrow down their initial preflop range very quickly but you can also make a load of assumptions about how they play and what they’re capable of. At the same time though I do acknowledge that postflop stats are pretty damn useless and this is why I want to get rid of them. I used to try to rely on them in tough spots but I’ve come to realise that they hurt more than they help and that taking detailed notes is just a hundred times better. To see why this is, I thought I’d do a little spiel today and I think lower stakes players would be well advised to think about this carefully.

The most common problem with postflop stats is that they don’t tell you anything at all about the hand you’re in because all they do is average out your opponent’s actions. To illustrate, imagine that you’re deciding whether to double barrel your opponent on a bluff. You look at your opponent’s fold to double barrel percentage and after seeing that it’s 50% you decide to fire a bet just under the size of the pot. Why? Because half the time you’ll take down the pot and half the time you’ll lose your under-pot-sized bet – a winning proposition you tell yourself! The problem with this reasoning is that it completely ignores the nature of the board (or indeed anything else about the hand). To keep things simple, imagine there are only two types of boards and that they come out with 50% frequency each – dry boards and wet boards. It may be the case that your opponent folds to a turn bet 100% of the time on the wet board while he calls 100% of the time on the dry board. If this was the case then obviously you should not fire a bet on every turn just because your opponent folds 50% overall. You’d pick and choose carefully. You’d fire every wet flop and you’d check/fold every dry flop. If you relied purely on the fold to turn bet stat however, you’d never make this vital adjustment.

Another good example of useless averages is the Won $ at Showdown stat. Quite simply, misunderstanding or misapplying this stat is going to be the most costly mistake you’ll ever make. Imagine that you’re facing a huge river bet in a now massive pot after being triple barreled or check-raised or double check-raised or something equally ridiculous. In deciding whether to call, you sneak a glance at their W$SD stat: 42%. Quite low, you think to yourself, and you call it off (making sure to time down so you don’t look a complete fool if you’re wrong). What’s the problem with this? In short, your opponent’s W$SD stat in a situation like this is completely meaningless. To see why this is, picture for yourself the great spectrum of hands that go down to showdown to average out to be your opponent’s W$SD figure. The great majority of these hands will be small to medium sized pots where your opponent had weak to medium strength holdings. Your opponent’s W$SD stat will thus largely be determined by these pots. The pot you just played, however, was not one of these pots. The pot you just played was a rare event, an outlier that will have a negligible effect on your opponent’s W$SD stat. Moreover, because your opponent’s range in this spot was likely to be incredibly skewed, his W$SD was likely to be closer to 0% or 100% than it was to the 42% figure you used. If the latter, your reliance on the stat just proved incredibly costly!

In addition to not telling you anything, some stats can also tell you the wrong thing, at least if you don’t know how to interpret them properly. One stat that readily illustrates this point is a player’s aggression factor. You’ve probably been told that people with high aggression factors are more likely to be bluffing while players with low aggression factors are more likely to be value betting. One thing I learnt very early on however was that it was quite the opposite for players with low aggression factors; when they bet they were almost always bluffing! The reason for this is quite simple when you think about it: players with low aggression factors DON’T value bet top pair. That’s why they have a low aggression factor in the first place. They pot control and check/call top pair all day long so that they can get to showdown. This means that when they do bet their range is a lot more polarised than you’d think and that second pair might be an easy call on your part. Another stat that ties in with this idea is someone’s double barrel stat. If someone double barrels you and you see their double barrel stat is extraordinarily low, don’t automatically fold your middle pair. If your opponent is a pot controller, as his low double barrel stat might indicate, then the double barrel you are facing is very likely to be a semi-bluff or even a pure bluff.

Anyway, that ends my spiel about stats. Hopefully some of you out there learnt something.