Introduction To Hand Histories And Pokertrackers
Almost all professional and semi-professional poker players are using advanced statistics software to analyze their own and their opponents play. In this article I will explain how and why they are doing this, and show you how to get started yourself.
Poker hand histories
Each time you play a hand of poker in an online poker room, the poker software saves a text file with a record of what happened on your computer. The file is called a “hand history”, and by reading it you can see exactly what happened in the poker hand.
Poker players use the hand histories to review the decisions they made while playing and often share the most interesting hand histories on poker forums to get advice from other players on how to play a similar hand in the future.
Pokertrackers
An experienced online poker player usually plays 400-800 hands/hour, which means that even a few hour of play will generate enough hand histories to fill several hundred pages if you decided to print them on paper. Since it isn’t practical to read all the hand histories, players use special software called “pokertrackers” to help them analyze the hands and find the ones they want to review themselves.
In addition to making it much easier to review your hand histories, pokertrackers also create advances statistics of both your own and your opponents play. This means that if you collect enough hand histories, you will be able to make fairly accurate estimates of which hands your opponents are playing.
The statistics isn’t meant to replace getting reads on your opponents and trying to get inside their head, and they won’t turn a bad player into a good one, however, for an experienced player the information they give can be extremely valuable.
If know that one of your opponents has been playing 50% of the hands he has been dealt, it is easy to see that if you have a hand that is just barely in the top 20% of the best hands, you will usually be in good shape against him. If he, on the other hand, were only playing 10% of the hands he were dealt, your hand would not hold up well against his.
This example is very basic, and even a mediocre poker player can see whether his opponent is playing 50% or 10% of his hands without any aid from a poker tracker. What the pokertrackers enable you to sift through millions of hand histories and extract statistics for situations that doesn’t occur very often, and give you a good idea of how your opponent acts in those kinds of situations.
You are able to see statistics about things like how often your opponent 3-bets against a player who open raises from the cut off, and how often he bets when someone check to him on the river.
How to Get Started with Pokertrackers?
If you want to try using a pokertracker yourself, you should start out with either Pokertracker 3 or Holdem Manager. Both programs are very popular among professional players, and while Holdem Manager seems to be slightly ahead of Pokertracker 3 when it comes to the most advanced features, it is slightly easier to get started using Pokertracker 3.
Both programs offer a free trial with no restrictions, so are able to see the benefits for yourself before you choose whether or not to invest in one of them.
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