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This article provides a brief description of hand history (HH) database tools and Heads-Up Displays (HUDs) and their most common uses for online poker players.  If you don’t have one of these programs or Rakeback, you are doing yourself and your bankroll a disfavor.  Disclaimer: the context of this post mostly relates to NLHE cash games and Pokertracker, but a lot of this will be applicable to NLHE tournament games and most of the features/stats mentioned below would be available with the other HH database tools.

Key Features of a HH database tool

• Track your winnings. You can see what your winrate is (in terms of BB/100, $/100, and $/hour). You can see wins/losses by session/tournaments; by specific date, or a range of dates; and you can see how you do with any particular hand (like AA) or particular group of hands (suited connectors).
• Collects and computes all sorts of stats for every hand of online poker you play.
• You can replay all of your hands. This is one of my favorite features. After a session, its helpful for me to go through and spot the mistakes I make. Often times I’ll book a nice win but see all kinds of places where I could have extracted more or lost less.
• Create fancy graphs showing your wins (or losses).
• Get all the same info on any of the villains you’ve faced (or are facing).  This is especially helpful when using a HUD.

Most Commonly Used Stats

Below are some of the most common stats people look at.  The terms used below are from Pokertracker – if you use a different tool, the verbiage may be different, but the concepts should be the same.

1. The Big 3 Stats
These are the stats you’ll most often see referred to in almost any hand history post in the poker forums.

Voluntarily Put $ in Pot (VPIP)
This stat tells you the percentage of hands that you voluntarily put money in the pot pre-flop. It includes limps or raises from all positions and (I think) completing from the SB. Most people consider VPIP standard for a “TAG” on a full ring table to be as low as 10% and as high as 20% (conventional wisdom varies, but I think that’s a good approximation of the range). That’s not to say that if you don’t have a VPIP in this range, you are, or will become, a losing player - it just means your style isn’t what is commonly thought as “TAG”.

The real key to VPIP (in my opinion) is your VPIP by position. You want your VPIP to be higher in later positions, and (much) lower from early positions.  Conventional wisdom is to have your late position VPIP about double your early position VPIP

Pre-flop Raise % (PFR)
This is the percentage of hands that you raise (or re-raise) pre-flop. Conventional wisdom is that you want your PFR to be fairly close to your VPIP. The idea is that you don’t want to be limping in a lot of pots (especially in early position). I see a lot of recommendations that your PFR should be at least 50% of your VPIP if not more (the 2 stats should be closer the earlier your position is because you don’t want to be limping from EP much).

Aggression Factor (AF)
This stat is a function of how much you raise or bet or raise vs. call.  I believe the formula is bets + raises over calls.   So if you have an aggression factor of 2.0, you are betting/raising twice as much as you call.   If your aggression factor is greater than 2.5-ish, then you are considered aggressive. Anything lower and you are considered passive. If you are 5 and higher, you might be too aggressive.  It is important to note that while you can get a pretty good idea how loose/aggressive a person is by VPIP and PFR with a small sample of hands, the AF stat doesn’t mean a lot until you have a greater sample size.


2. Other helpful stats
Winrate (WR)
On many of the major forums, this is typically stated as ptBB/100 (Pokertracker Big Bets per 100 hands) because Pokertracker was the program that started it all and it was initially designed for limit Hold ‘em. Since Pokertracker started as a database for limit players, a ptBB is defined as 2x the Big Blind. I would think that other HH database would use BB/100, so be careful when you are comparing BB/100 and know if you are looking at ptBB/100, or just plain BB/100. These tools also will show you your BB/hour and $/hour, but ptBB/100 seems to be the “standard” used when discussing winrates for online poker play. I’m a noob on tournament stuff, but I think the key winrate-type stat for tournaments is ROI.

Attempt to Steal Blinds (ATS)
This stat shows the % of time you attempt to steal blinds from the button, cut-off  and small blind (i.e. everyone has folded to you in these spots and you raise). The range I usually see as being considered a “good” ATS is around 25-30%. This is of course very opponent/table dependent, but over a significant sample, this where you probably want to fall.

Folds to Steals
You can either have a stat that shows the percentage you (or villain) folds both blinds to a steal in total, or stats that have just folds small blind to a steal and big blind to a steal.   Since we want to be doing a fair amount of stealing from late position, these stats are very helpful to us.  For example, if you are on the button and the small blind and big blind have a 100% fold blind to a steal, then by all means raise with any 2 cards 100% of the time its folded to you.

Other good stats to analyze:

• Continuation Bet % (this tells you how often you are cbetting)
• Folds to continuation bet (helpful to know if your opponent folds to cbets a lot, you’ll want to cbet with a wide range)
• 3 bet %
• Fold to 3 bet %