mpethypoker.com

Rasmussen didn’t actually conclude that 20% of Americans are idiots, but its new poll on internet poker demonstrates the fact quite clearly.

Responding to polling questions on gambling, 61% of Americans believed that people ought to be allowed to play poker or other games at home for money, but when asked if people ought to be allowed to play poker or other games for money on the internet, only 41% said yes.

OK. So there is our 20% What sort of blithering idiot thinks, “well, yeah, playing live poker at home is ok, but playing internet poker is not?”

In case you were wondering, Rasmussen actually answered the rhetorical question, “what sort of blithering idiot…”

The profile of your average blithering idiot is very likely: Older than 65, middle class to lower middle class, and female. Drilling down into the Rasmussen results just a little shows that these are the three groups most opposed to internet gambling.

In one of those “Seriously? Just go fuck yourself, America” moments, the poll also showed support for state lotteries at 52%. In my opinion, this is serious evidence that 11% of Americans should be taken out and shot. Who anywhere in the neighborhood of his right mind thinks, “yeah, lotteries good, internet poker bad?” What kind of mouth-breathing moron do you need to be to hold both of those opinions in your tiny little brain simultaneously?

Off topic: Some of you may think that taking 11% of Americans out and shooting them is probably extreme, and I might agree in my cooler headed moments. But on a different subject, another Rasmussen poll demonstrated that the number should be no lower than 4%. How do we find the 4%? It’s easy: 78% of Americans believe that Jesus is the son of God. 74% believe he arose from the dead. There’s your 4%–the 4% of people who thought, “yeah, I got no problem believing that the invisible sky man sexed up the earth chick, but no way her son died and came back to life.”To those 4% of Americans, I say: Happy Easter Morons. Now please go die in a grease fire.

On a serious note, I see very little good news in the Rasmussen poll on poker, and that is mainly why I am ranting at the results. If support for internet poker is only at 41%, and opposition is at 42%, it does not seem very likely that we’ll see legislation this year. It seems Congress would need more evidence of popular support before moving on the issue.

I had an interesting coaching session today with a solid winning 6 max player at NL $50.

Rooting around in his database, I saw that he was losing money with small pocket pairs. I have steps I go through to identify the specific leak that is causing the negative win rate. I pinned the problem down to a negative win rate when he raised first in.

When we identified this as the problem area, he said, “I know, I always get 3 bet and have to fold.” I said, “yes, this is the price of doing business with small pocket pairs, but good post flop play can overcome the drag on your win rate caused by the folds to three bets.”

Out of curiosity, I went ahead and filtered his database for facing preflop 3 bet = false, and, sure enough, he was slightly positive. But I also noticed that his number of hands dropped off dramatically. So I went back and looked at the number of raises and, wow! he was 3 bet 25% of the time he raised first in with a small pocket pair.

That seemed absurdly high, so I compared it to some other groups of hands, and saw:

• When he raised first in with premium pairs and broadway, he was only 3 bet 12% of the time.
• When he raised first in with medium pocket pairs, he was 3 bet 15% of the time.

12% and 15% are right in the range of how frequently I expect people to face a 3 bet. The blocking effect and maybe a bit of variance explains the difference in these frequencies he faced a 3 bet, but the small pocket pairs result was just way out of line.

We laughed a bit about Full Tilt being rigged and moved on to look at his post flop play (which was leaky after all). But, man, that stat in a big sample was so out of line that it’d make you wonder.

He had a big sample, too. So today served as yet another example of the weird and nearly infinite number of ways you can run bad in a big sample, and also highlighted the importance of the steps I take in leak finding a player’s database to control for variance.

This is a pretty exciting step in the evolution of mpethypoker.com. Today, I put up the first of what I hope will be an extensive library of paid content aimed at helping you do your own leak finding in Hold Em Manager and Poker Tracker 3.

In the usual 2 hour coaching session I do for NL $50 and $25 players, I intentionally focus the effort in plugging the major leaks in a player’s game. Necessarily, we don’t spend the time required to plug all leaks.

The paid content on this site will close that gap. For a modest price, you’ll receive access to step-by-step leak finding worksheets on a variety of different poker situations so you can analyze your own game.

The first of these worksheets deals with isolating limpers. It is never a major leak in a player’s game, but it is very often a minor leak. So it was a good place to start the paid content. For only $7.00 and about two hours of your own time, you’ll be able to identify and start the process of plugging the five or six different types of leaks that show up in the isolation games of even some of the best micro and small stakes grinders.

If you apply the advice in the article and identify your existing isolation play leaks, it’ll easily pay for itself in your next session. To buy the article, just go to the Poker Articles (Not So Free) page and click on the Paypal checkout button.

I’ll be adding more premium content in the near future, so check back often.

Just posting a link to my Concept of the Week article on 2+2 on restealing in microstakes.

Quantifying Common Sense Observations on How the Field 3-Bets

This post started out as an exercise in idle curiosity, but as I crunched the numbers, I realized that there is some utility in the information, so I decided to go ahead and post what I did, as well as some follow up thoughts on how to use this information.

Question: How often do I face a 3 bet when I was the preflop raiser?

Rationale for the question: in today’s aggressive 3 betting game, does it make sense to open up our range or tighten it up? I’m thinking of marginal hands in EP; one of the risks of opening (for example) 22 UTG is that you’ll get 3 bet off your hand. So I wanted to know how often this would happen. This would allow me, among other things, to predict a portion of the losses I will take with 22. This, in turn, would allow me to determine how profitably I have to play it when I don’t get 3 bet. I can then look at data such as my WR with 66 (which i already open), and my WR with 22 from MP3 (from where I already open 22) to give me reasonably accurate prediction on whether I can potentially add 22 to my UTG range.

My Data Set

At NL $200, I have a 160,000 hand sample on this computer that I used to gather this data. I also have 12,000 hands of NL $50. 12k hands is not, and and of itself, a reliable sample; however, the data from my NL $50 hands matches what I would expect to see based on my NL $200 data, so I have confidence that this particular 12k sample is reasonably variance free.

I just wrote this in response to a poster on 2+2, and decided to repost it here:

There’s not a lot of activity there, which I hope will change, but I just made a pretty detailed analysis of how to think about what Hold Em Manager’s infamous River Call Efficiency stat is telling us about our game.

I just finished a marathon 6 hour session (scheduled for 4) with a very solid NL $100 grinder. he shall remain nameless, because I forgot to ask him whether he minded if I named him. (I generally don’t mention the names or screen names of people I have coached without permission unless they out themselves by posting in my coaching thread or whatever).

It was a great session. We noticed two really fascinating issues that I had been approaching having an ah-ha moment on, and I never really got there.

Since all of this will be new to everybody once I do the necessary analysis, I have decided that both of these subjects will be the core of the paid material I give away to the people that registered for my forum. I’ll probably write a detailed article on each of them, and probably one other subject, and that will be the package that everybody gets.

A word on angle-shooting: I offered the free package to anybody who signed up and posted in my forum. I will honor that statement, of course. But the clear intent of the offer was to build a new forum where all of us smart people could get together and discuss issues specifically addressing using Hold Em Manager and Poker Tracker 3 to find leaks in their poker game. I wouldn’t hate it if that happened, and it’s not too late for us to get the discussion going.

As today demonstrates, while I am certainly a solid leak finder using HEM and PT3, I do not by any stretch of the imagination have everything all figured out. If we use the forum for its intended purpose we can all get there faster and make more money at poker.

Just to briefly mention the topics more as a memory aid to me (it’s going to be a few days before I can get to thinking about this stuff in detail):

Topic one concerns conducting an analysis of starting hands based on their WTSD%

Topic two concerns using c-betting success rates to tailor a situation-specific double barreling strategy.

As I said, look for these two articles and one other in the upcoming paid content that registrants will receive for free.