What effect (if any) do you think playing some of the more marginal hands has on your ability to win the really big pots?
In other words, to what extent do you think people are over-adjusting and calling too wide based on what they have seen you do earlier?
Do specific stakes and bluffing frequencies seem to affect this?
Does that mean that your VPIP is 62,4%? Even more impressive!
Very little because most of the players all the way up to the 9-max tables at 100/200 adjust very little if at all. They just call when they want to call.
Only on the 4-max tables as well as the 6-max tables at 200/400 have I encountered mostly reasonably observant opponents. At those tables, I couldn’t get away with open-shoving strong hands or raising them to 10-20bb. My opponents would just fold unless they had a really strong hand. So I had to adjust and use more standard bet sizings. As the opponents were more cautious in general, I was starting to bluff a bit more, but I don’t think that I ever had a particularly bluff-heavy image.
The vast majority of the “gigantic” pots were played at stakes up to 25/50. Only 12 of the 91 “gigantic” pots were at stakes 50/100 and above: 6 at 9-max tables, 3 at 6-max tables, and 3 at 4-max tables.
No, my VPIP was definitely much lower than that.
You can’t see from the data what exactly my VPIP was. Note that the 1bb category includes the hands where I’m in the big blind or in the small blind, where I often just fold or check-fold, which doesn’t count towards VPIP. Also, when I check in the big blind and flop a good hand, then some 0-VPIP hands can actually end up in one of the “Small” and higher categories.
I think you said ^^^ up there that you were limping small pairs and small suited connectors. Of the 91 hands mentioned, do you know how many were limped? (The old saying, “Never go broke in a limped pot,” comes to mind) What there hand types that performed better than expected? Worse?
I know 91 hands is a small sample, but just wondering.
I was often doing that up to the 9-max tables at 100/200. I didn’t do it much at the 4-max tables and at the 6-max tables at 200/400 (instead I just open-raised or open-folded them).
I don’t know how many were limped. Here are the counts of my hands in the 91 “gigantic” pots and the 152 “huge” pots:
| Gigantic | Huge | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Hand | Count | Hand | Count |
| AKo | 10 | AA | 11 |
| 8 | AKo | 10 | |
| KK | 8 | KK | 10 |
| AA | 5 | 9 | |
| AKs | 4 | AJo | 7 |
| 88 | 4 | AQo | 6 |
| AJo | 3 | KQo | 6 |
| 66 | 3 | TT | 5 |
| AQs | 3 | AKs | 5 |
| T9s | 2 | KQs | 5 |
| K8s | 2 | QJo | 4 |
| KJs | 2 | JJ | 4 |
| 22 | 2 | KJs | 4 |
| KQo | 2 | QJs | 3 |
| AQo | 2 | KJo | 3 |
| JJ | 2 | 66 | 3 |
| KJo | 2 | 88 | 3 |
| TT | 2 | QTo | 3 |
| A2s | 1 | 75s | 3 |
| 75s | 1 | 98o | 2 |
| 98s | 1 | 22 | 2 |
| KQs | 1 | 99 | 2 |
| ATo | 1 | 54s | 2 |
| KTo | 1 | QTs | 2 |
| 44 | 1 | 76o | 2 |
| JTo | 1 | 43o | 1 |
| 86o | 1 | A7s | 1 |
| K9s | 1 | 87s | 1 |
| K9o | 1 | K5s | 1 |
| K3s | 1 | K3s | 1 |
| K3o | 1 | 74s | 1 |
| A9s | 1 | Q9o | 1 |
| K5o | 1 | 87o | 1 |
| A4s | 1 | Q4s | 1 |
| A5s | 1 | A4s | 1 |
| QTs | 1 | KTo | 1 |
| 55 | 1 | 65o | 1 |
| A9o | 1 | K8s | 1 |
| A7s | 1 | 92o | 1 |
| T6s | 1 | Q9s | 1 |
| 99 | 1 | 43s | 1 |
| A8s | 1 | T7s | 1 |
| ATs | 1 | K7o | 1 |
| J5s | 1 | ||
| T6o | 1 | ||
| AJs | 1 | ||
| T9s | 1 | ||
| A4o | 1 | ||
| 86s | 1 | ||
| A2o | 1 | ||
| A5s | 1 | ||
| A9s | 1 | ||
| T6s | 1 | ||
| A9o | 1 | ||
| A7o | 1 | ||
| T2o | 1 | ||
| 77 | 1 | ||
| 65s | 1 | ||
| 97s | 1 | ||
| T4s | 1 | ||
| ATs | 1 |
As you can see, it’s mostly AK, premium pocket pairs, some other pocket pairs that likely made sets and other high Ax, but there are also some suited connectors, suited gappers, suited Aces, broadways, and other random hands.
This question is difficult to answer because I don’t know how to quantify the expected performance of a hand or hand type. However, your question gave me the idea to group the profits by hand family across all hands played and find the fraction of the P&L that each hand family was responsible for (possibly normalized by its frequency). This will come in another post.
Which starting hands were most profitable?
There are 13 * 13 = 169 non-equivalent starting hands in Texas hold’em. They are conveniently arranged in a 13-by-13 matrix with the pairs on the top-left to bottom-right diagonal, all suited combinations above this diagonal, and all offsuit combinations below.
I have computed the P&L of all 169 starting hands in my sample. I show the result in two ways:
The variance of these numbers is huge, so one has to be very careful not to interpret too much into them. The P&L of many of these starting hands is often dominated by only a few or even just one hand. For example:
Some observations:
Thanks BW! Great thread and analysis.
Big thanks for taking the time to put this all together for us.
How did my range look like?
My data set cannot tell me how exactly I played each starting hand and also doesn’t contain any information about my position at the table when I got a certain starting hand. Nonetheless, I can visualize my average approximate range by considering the frequencies with which I was putting chips into the pot relative to the total number of times I was dealt a particular starting hand.
I consider four categories:
I then computed, for each starting hand, the frequency of the starting hand falling into these categories relative to the total number of times I was dealt the starting hand. The results are shown in the following four heatmaps. Charts (a) and (b) give a decent approximation of my average starting range. Charts (c) and (d) show which hands were most likely willing to put a medium or big amount of chips into the pot, respectively.
