PokerTracker and PAHud

I bought PokerTracker and PAHud yesterday as I've been wanting to get them for a while but never thought I'd use it enough to make it worth it. Now I have got it I can honestly say I can't imagine playing without them and I'd say they've probably already paid their cost back in winnings that I wouldn't have got otherwise. It is especially useful for me when I'm 4 tabling and watching TV or something as it means that I dont have to concentrate so much to see who the aggressive players are who could be opening with a wide range of hands. Obviously its useful to concentrate to see player's betting patterns but I have found that the programs have helped my preflop play alot. Whereas before I would probably just flat-call a raise in front of me with hands like AJ or KQ I now tend to either raise or fold depending on what the stats for the player are. This has led to me saving alot of money by folding marginal hands when tight players raise and win alot more pots preflop with reraises.

I'm currently writing this whilst playing a $3rebuy qualifier for the Party $300k where I'm average stack at 52k with 50 left and 10 getting seats. HOWEVER... the tournament has frozen apart from one table which carried on playing and is now down to 1 player who knocked everyone else on that table out and has 325k chips when the next biggest stack on any other frozen table is 125k which obviouosly would give him a huge advantage if the tourney became unstuck. I dont know how Party are going to sort this one out! Its just a wierd situation that one table was allowed to play whereas usually they all stop if something goes wrong!

On the poker front I've just been grinding the cash tables as usual, the previous couple of days I've had some decent sessions lost a couple of key crucial pots that make or break the night. I dropped about $50 over the 2 days which wasnt too bad. Since I got poker tracker however I've made that back plus another $40 to put my bankroll up over $600. This is despite losing a $64 stack with bottom 2 pair versus top 2 pair on an AJ4 board when I should never have got in so much trouble. In fact I kind of blame Poker Tracker for that loss as I had the villian playing 65% of flops and raising pre 34% of the time so there was no way I could put him on AJ in an unraised flop. Another factor was that I had already won about $35 of him as he was a bit of a mentalist...but I was still kicking myself for losing 250BB with bottom 2 pair.

I tried putting all my hand histories into Poker Tracker but succeeded only in deleting all my Party ones from the last month meaning I'm missing the hands where I was running good and made about $400 of my profit. However, I did manage to get some on plus all my noble poker hands since I've had my new laptop and a few off Sun Poker as well as all the Party cash games I've played since yesterday and in total now have 5.3k hands logged in the following games:

850 hands playing $0.25/0.50 on Noble for a profit of $38

1650 hands playing $0.10/0.20 on Noble for a profit of $65

2800 hands playing $0.10/0.25 on Party for a profit of $270

Overall I have a made a profit of around $380 at just over 14BB/100

Having read and understood alot more about what the pokertracker stats mean I can tell you that I am running at 24/9/1.5 which is pretty tight and passive but I see no reason to change at these levels because it seems to be a winning formula for me.

Position wise I have made a profit from every seat on the table apart from the big blind:

Big Blind : -$72
Small Blind : +$53
Button : +$162
Cutoff : +$129
UTG+1 : +$91
UTG : +$28

I think a major factor in my negative big blind stat is that one hand where I lost $64 and if I had won that I would have positive returns from all positions.

The tournament on Party is still frozen but I'm going to have to leave it and go to bed as I'm playing golf early tomorrow morning.