Poker bankroll management, building and strategy – online poker guide

Poker analysis software – how to get an edge in online poker

Friday, February 26th, 2010 | Poker Articles, Poker Tools | No Comments

Submitted by Steve, this article belongs to the Poker Tools series.

Many online poker players use specially designed software to analyze their opponents’ and their own game. This makes perfect sense. Software like PokerTracker, Holdem Manager or SNGWiz will help you gain an insight into what goes on at your table, as well as into exactly how you’re coping with the challenge. Rest assured, using PokerTracker or SNGWiz does not make you guilty of data mining. You’ll only make use of data which is available to everyone anyway. What the software does is that it keeps track of things and compiles statistics the average human brain would be incapable to do.

As I said, many people use such software aid while playing, but few people use these programs to their full potential.
Here’s a rundown of the various statistics such programs generate, together with an explanation and pointers towards interpreting the data.

There are two basic types of statistics poker tracking programs such as PokerTracker, Holdem Manager or SNGWiz generate, namely preflop statistics and post-flop ones.

Let’s start with the preflop stats.

The VPIP% (Voluntarily Put Into Pot) expresses the number of times your opponent put money into the pot of his own will (blinds do not count here) in a percentage-based manner. The higher this stat is, the looser your opponent is. The lower the stat, the tighter the opponent. In a 6-max NL Holdem game, a VPIP% should normally be around 19-24%.

The PFR% (Preflop Raise percentage) is an expression of how often your opponent raises preflop. This one will help you asses your opponent’s preflop aggression level. When compared to the VPIP, the PFR can tell you how often an opponent cold-calls, which is an extremely efficient indication of his fish status. You can use all these stats on yourself too, in order to determine how optimal your play is.

3b% (three-bet percentage) is a measure of how often someone re-raises preflop. The lower this stat is, the tighter your opponent is on his three bets. If his 3b% is around 3%, he doesn’t really light three bet, and you can feel safe putting him on AA-10,10, AQs, AKs, whenever he does.

The F3 (fold to 3-bet) is an extremely useful stat. This will tell you how often you can light three bet against an opponent to force him to give up the pot.

Moving on to the post flop stats
The post flop stats are equally interesting, and potentially useful. The AG (a measure of the aggression factor of your opponent) will let you know when you can run roughshod over someone. For the AG, a value of 1-3 is normal. If your guy has an AG of 0.5, put pressure on him and get out of his way when he strikes back. An aggression factor of about 4 means you should take it easy with this guy, pick up a monster and let him tie the noose around his own neck.

WTSD% tells you how often your guy goes all the way after he takes a look at the flop. The normal values are between 20-30% here. Use this stat together with the AG one and find out whether your opponent is weak-tight or tight aggressive.

The CB is the continuation betting %. This stat is only useful when used in conjunction with the PFR%. The lower the PFR% is, the higher the CB should be.

The 2B is a stat describing how often your opponent fires the second barrel on a post-flop bet.

The FC is an extremely valuable stat: it tells you how often your opponent folds his continuation bets. The F2 is how often the guy folds to a second barrel bet.

When you use these stats, please take the sample size into account. The larger the sample size (the more hands you track your target-opponent through) the more relevant these stats will be. Small sample sizes have a tendency to mislead.

These stats can even be used to approximate the rakeback amount that you’ll generate through your real money play. If you’re signed up to a poker prop deal or to a rake rebate deal, you’ll be able to estimate your rake contribution and thus your due rakeback as well.

You could be posting your articles on the Poker Bankroll Blog. Read all about it here.

Check out our Poker Freeroll and Tournament League.

Tags: Poker Articles, Poker Tools

An Introduction to Poker Tracker

Saturday, December 12th, 2009 | Poker Articles, Poker Tools | 3 Comments

This article belongs to the Poker Tools series

Since amateur poker players started showing up to live tournaments and winning millions of dollars by taking down the so-called professionals of the sport, the online poker industry has literally exploded. Millions of people from across the globe are looking to hone their craft and win some big bucks by playing games like Texas Hold’em and Omaha. And they’re all looking for that proverbial edge to make winning easier.
Enter Poker Tracker.

Poker Tracker Software, LLC is the company behind its namesake Poker Tracker software line. In short, Poker Tracker is a software tool that performs a series of statistical analyses during the course of your poker game. By compiling data and quantifying results, Poker Tracker acts as an external brain, so to speak, giving poker players a crucial edge by upgrading the one tool every player needs: Memory.

In poker, many will concede that luck is a factor. Hot streaks and cold streaks are real. The power of that blank stare and the coldblooded bluff – these are all essential traits to have. But without a good memory, especially in the online world, a player’s game will suffer. Poker Tracker records and stores all essential details of the game.

The software feature has a large database library, keeping track of hand histories, profits and losses, number of hands played, time at the table, the table style (as in limit), and it breaks it all down to a sweet science, calculating graphs of statistics that a player can check to figure out how much they’re winning and losing per hand, per hour and per game.

Poker Tracker doesn’t work on every brand of poker. If you like to play best video poker online, then you won’t be benefiting from the software. But for every other poker game, like Hold’em, Stud and Omaha, the software keeps track of your entire game.

The real benefit here is that it helps an individual player to understand his or her strengths and weaknesses. By looking at these thorough records that are simplified into easy-to-understand graphics, a player can better know when to bet and when to get out, as well as knowing how much to stake and where to play.

Poker is all about percentages, when you really get down to the heart of the matter. A tool like Poker Tracker is basically an odds calculator for every conceivable aspect of the online game.

The software is 100% legal. In fact, most of the largest and most legitimate poker sites on the web endorse the use of the tool. So, basically, Poker Tracker isn’t a tool that gives you the edge over other players, per se; it just helps your game to be all it can be. And this is why poker sites have no problem allowing the add-on software to be used in conjunction with their sites.

PokerTracker3 is available from their website for $89.99 for the full version, $49.99 for micro stakes, and you can also receive a free trial version to see if you like it.

Tags: Poker Articles, Poker Tools

GrinderSchool.com review

Sunday, December 6th, 2009 | Poker Articles, Poker Tools | 4 Comments

This article belongs to the Poker Tools series

Introduction to the GrinderSchool low stakes poker school

GrinderSchool is an online poker school focused on helping low stakes players to win money consistently. They do this by offering members access to SNG, cash game and multi-table tournament instruction videos, as well as access to an active and well moderated poker forum.
The GrinderSchool team includes 8 skilled poker enthusiasts / professionals who are the main source of videos and forum threads.
GrinderSchool’s focus on low stakes poker strategy, combined with low membership costs, makes them a great resource site for poker players on a budget who are looking to improve their game.
Currently, the GrinderSchool poker school has more than 500 poker videos on file and with 5 new poker videos added each week there’s plenty to choose from.

Membership costs

The GrinderSchool low stakes poker school has two membership options, namely Micro stakes subscription and Full site subscription. Micro stakes subscribers have access to the GrinderSchool forum and all cash games videos with a buyin below 10$ and any tournament videos with 1$ buyins. Full site subscribers have access to the full GrinderSchool site (no surprises here)

• A Micro stakes subscription will set you back 10$ a month

• A Full site subscription costs 19,99$, if you pay one month a time. If you pay for more months in advance, the monthly fee drops. In fact, if you pay for 12 months in advance the monthly fee for the full site subscription drops to 10$ a month.

Payment can be made both through PayPal and via Full Tilt Poker.

If you ask me, there’s no reason not to choose the full site subscription, if you’re considering joining GrinderSchool. I believe the added value of having full access to all videos clearly outweighs the added monthly subscription cost.

In the following, I have chosen some of the features I like the best on the GrinderSchool site, as well as some of the annoyances I have experienced while navigating the site.

GrinderSchool poker school features – poker videos

Together with the GrinderSchool forum, the GrinderSchool poker video section is the heart of the low stakes poker strategy content on the site. You can find poker videos covering close to all of the aspects you need to take into consideration to beat low stakes games. I exclusively play multi-table tournaments, so obviously I checked out some of the poker videos in the multi-table tournament section. I liked the fact that each poker video has its own introductory page where it is possible to comment on the video, as well as read other user’s comments. In addition most videos are offered in both .FLV and .WMV formats with 0 DRM (Digital rights management) which means that members can download the GrinderSchool videos and use them however they please so long as they remain personal use only.

I looked through a series of 5 poker videos by a guy named AAPoker who walks us through the different stages of an 11$ rebuy multi-table tournament win on Full Tilt Poker. I really appreciated the way AAPokerexplained his thought-process behind each hand he played, and I was also pleased to have confirmed that you need a fair bit of luck to take down a big MTT tournament (the 3 2 hearts vs KK was especially amusing). It also made me realize, that I have to focus more on putting my opponents on a hand range when I play tournaments.

Here’s a list of pointers I wrote down after watching all the poker videos in the series:

• During the rebuy period, be prepared to push all in with small to medium pocket pairs and high card combinations.
• It is better to lose playing aggressive than lose playing passively
• Min raises do not mean anything on FTP
• Poker Tracker is a great tool to get stats on your opponents. Having a database of player info will give you an edge in some situations where tough decisions are to be made. Especially in tournaments where you get moved around a lot, and don’t often  have time to get a read on players, it is great to stumble into players you already have data on from previous tournaments
• Sometimes it’s good to smooth call when you hit good hands; it builds the pot and gives your opponent a chance to put all his chips in
• If you’re raising short stacked players, just push all in instead and put the decision on them. You are going to call a re-push anyway.

GrinderSchool poker school features – coaching

If you are truly dedicated to poker, the GrinderSchool low stakes poker school offers private coaching as the fastest way to improve your game. I will go so far so say that all serious professional competitors – be it athletes, racing drivers or chess players – have had a private coach at some point in their careers.

GrinderSchool poker school features – forum

The bulk of the GrinderSchool forum is closed to outsiders to avoid the usual spam that these kinds of forums usually tend to accumulate. This means that almost all the content on the GrinderSchool low stakes poker school forum has poker relevance. You can actually think of it as a poker article database. Once you learn how to navigate it you will literally be able to spend days soaking up poker knowledge.

GrinderSchool poker school features – store

How cool is this? GrinderSchool has an online shop where you can purchase GrinderSchool low stakes poker school merchandise such as t-shirts, caps and mugs with the GrinderSchool logo. Payment can be made with Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover and Gift Certificates.

GrinderSchool poker school annoyances

First of all, the front page header is messed up in Firefox (3.5.5) on my Mac (Mac OS X Version 10.5.8) and run the latest. I have taken a screen shot of the header and included it below. The header looks fine in Internet Explorer and will therefore most likely also look fine on PCs.

In my opinion the GrinderSchool site faces similar challenges to many other online knowledge based sites. How to give users an overview of a lot of information while maintaining a clean and streamlined user interface? GrinderSchool have approached this problem by including a TAG cloud on both the forum and video sub-pages. I’m not sure how fond I am of this solution. The problem with organization of information through tags, is that if you do not have some kind of system on how to apply them to information, you run the risk of losing overview.

As a first time user, my impression of the GrinderSchool forum and video sections was that it would take me a very long time to get an overview of all the information present. What I’m missing is some kind of underlying information structuring that will allow me to faster navigate the site. On the forum there’s currently a lot of scrolling and clicking on multiple sub-pages, which I do not like.

Finally, I have to say that in my opinion, the overall appearance of the site is not up to 2009 standards. It is basically a large collection of interlinked static pages with a boring design. There are no dynamic elements which is a crime given the fact that nowadays there are so many possibilities of including dynamic elements to a web page. In fact, when I first saw the GrinderSchool site, I’m sorry to say that I did not get the impression they were a serious poker school. Their product is great, but it definitely deserves better wrapping.

Conclusion

Although I do have a few personal problems with the overall design of the site, I have to stress that this is a minor issue. It does not in any way take away from the fact that the GrinderSchool webpage is packed with quality poker strategy material. Additionally, the evaluation of design is always subjective. What doesn’t look good to me will most likely look very good to others.

In conclusion, I would recommend anyone who wants to learn poker and improve their game to sign up to the GrinderSchool poker school. The sheer amount of poker strategy material available on the site makes the low monthly subscription costs a steal. If you are new to the game, this could easily be one of the best investments you make in your entire poker career.

You could be posting your articles on the Poker Bankroll Blog. Read all about it here.

Check out our Poker Freeroll and Tournament League.

Tags: Poker Articles, Poker Tools

What is Videopoker and is it something you should spend time on?

Saturday, December 5th, 2009 | Poker Articles, Poker Tools | 2 Comments

Video poker is usually played on slot machines and since its introduction in the 1970’s, videopoker has become the most popular form of slot machine worldwide.

Videopoker is basically man against machine. You start by choosing the game you want to play and then choose the size of your bet. Usually videopoker machines are coin operated with an allowed bet size of one to five coins.

After you have put your money in the videopoker machine it will deal you 5 cards and give you the option of keeping your good cards and exchanging your bad cards. After you have exchanged your cards, the videopoker machine will automatically credit your bank in case of a win. Whether you win or not, depends on the particular details of the game you chose. The minimum requirement for a winning hand is usually a pair of Jacks. The smaller the probability is of hitting a certain hand, the higher the payouts are. A Royal Flush pays the most, then comes a straight flush, four of a kind and so on.

So, is videopoker something you should spend time on? Well, some sites claim that videopoker will challenge your poker skills and eliminate the competition you usually face on real poker tables.

I really cannot agree with these statements. Without the competition from other players and the possibility of outplaying your opponents, the game of poker is reduced to pure chance and the ability to recognize poker hands.

In my opinion, if you want to improve your poker skills, you would be much better of depositing a small amount on a poker site offering micro limit games such as Full Tilt Poker. Start at the smallest tables and move up when your poker skills improve. There are plenty of online resources where you can read more on how to improve your game. The Poker Bankroll Blog is one of those sites.

Nevertheless, if you’re looking for a fast gambling fix where a small amount of skill is need, then videopoker is just as good as any other slot machine on the market.

You could be posting your articles on the Poker Bankroll Blog. Read all about it here.

Check out our Poker Freeroll and Tournament League.

Tags: Poker Articles, Poker Tools

What are the best poker sunglasses?

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 | Poker Articles, Poker Tools | 4 Comments

Submitted by James, this article belongs to the Poker Tools series.

Wearing sunglasses at the poker table continues to be the fastest growing trend in the game.  Walk into any casino poker room in Las Vegas, or any local bar with a free poker game, and you will see 30-40% of the players wearing their favorite sunglasses while playing.  Some players wear them to hide their own eyes.  Others wear them to have that “intimidation factor” when they are staring down their opponent.  WSOP Main Event champion Greg Raymer wears his trademark “dinosaur eyes” glasses because it simply is distracting to have those ugly things looking right at you.
I know from my regular play that most amateur players will immediately glance at their chip stack after seeing a big hand when they look at their cards, so hiding their eyes can immediately solve this habit.  Besides that simple tell, glasses can also hide blinking patterns, the wide-eyed look of surprise when you see A-A, and numerous other things other players can see by watching you.
With this in mind, I decided to test out several different brands of glasses to see which actually help my game, and which ones hurt it.  The differences were incredible.

I judged the glasses on seven factors:
-    Price  (and what I would really pay for these)
-    Style
-    Quality
-    Selection
-    Visibility of my eyes
-    Visibility of the hole cards
-    Visibility of the rest of the table

I then selected three of the more popular brands from the internet, along with a couple of pair of average sunglasses that you can buy in any WalMart or Target.  We can call this last category simply “Cheapo’s”.

The three that I compared are:
Royal Poker Eyewear
Poker Armor
Blue Shark Optics

One of the first factors that stand out is price.  I tried glasses ranging from $9.99 from Target to $169 from Blue Shark Optics.  Being a firm believer that price doe’s not always equal quality, I knew I was going to have fun with the comparisons.

To begin with, in the interest of brevity, I am immediately going to throw out the cheapo’s from the discount stores.  They are fine for wearing at the beach, or while driving, but they have absolutely no place at the poker table.  These sunglasses are designed to reduce light, and most poker rooms are already dark.  The average player, wearing the average cheap pair of sunglasses, regularly misreads suits, and mistakes the 4 for an Ace.  A recipe for disaster when there is money on the line.

Now that we’ve established that poker eyewear must be designed for poker play, I began the true comparison.  I had three sunglass wearing friends order a product from each company, and wear them while playing poker for a week.  They then switched glasses for another week, and switched one more time for the final week.  The final reviews and recommendations from each participant were consistent and unanimous.
Royal Eyewear has received some publicity as the eyewear worn and recommended by David “Devilfish” Ulliot.  At $79.00, their glasses came in at the midrange of price.  They make only one model, which is a narrow wrap around frame.  Their lenses are coated with an anti-reflective film, and work well in low light.

Our reviewers all had the same criticism of the Royal Eyewear though.
1.     Lack of choice in frame styles.   Every face is different, and different players prefer different styles.  Royal’s decision to limit their offering to one style certainly reduces costs, but provides no user choices.

2.    Lack of quality in the one frame style they do offer.  The frame is a molded plastic with no enhancements, other than the company logo on the temple.  A simple padding around the nose would have gone a long way to increase the comfort also.

3.    While the lenses do increase the light to the user, this increase comes with one huge setback:  The wearer’s eyes can be clearly seen by the other players.  Royal Eyewear advertises that their lens coating provides 98% shielding of your eyes, but this turned out to be in the amount of the eye the frame covers, and not the actual visibility of the eye itself from across the table.

To be perfectly honest, I do not rate these glasses any higher than the cheap glasses you can get from Target or WalMart, and Royal charges $79.

Poker Armor eyewear received somewhat higher grades, simply because they had more choices, and a cheaper price.  With three frame styles, all at $58.00, their appeal could certainly be understood.  However of the three styles they offer, only one (The Secret Agent) was even deemed wearable by the reviewers.  The other two were rejected by the reviewers before the order was placed.
This being said, the quality simply wasn’t there to support a $58 price tag.
As with Royal Eyewear, the reviewers all had one high mark of praise, and some consistent complaints about the Secret Agent.  The praise was in simple comfort.  The Secret Agent is a lightweight frame that is comfortable to wear for long periods of time.  Beyond that though, our review panel of all three gave a thumbs down to the product based on one resounding reason:  They simply didn’t protect the eyes from view.  The lens was too small, and did not extend to the sides of the eyes.  And quite honestly, you can see right through them from across the table.  The light enhancement was decent enough, but not enough to warrant recommending the glasses.

Lastly, we took a look at Blue Shark Optics.  One of the first things you notice when you visit their website is the choices.  At this time, Blue Shark is offering eight different styles to choose from.  Two of these are being phased out, but the remaining six are in a variety of stylish frames that are sure to satisfy the needs of any customer.

The lens on the Blue Shark glasses all have what the company calls Crystalion-3 coating.  This coating not only increased light to the user, but was virtually impenetrable from the outside.  You simply could not detect eye movement when looking at the wearer.  Our reviewer’s chose the Viper Shark, simply to be somewhat consistent in comparing the glasses, as this was the closest style to match the two from the other companies.  While we based our review off of the Viper Shark, the true poker enthusiast would probably be more interested in the MP3 Tiger Shark.  1GB of storage built into the frame, with ear buds perfect placed to allow any player to sit for up to 5 hours jamming to their favorite tunes without the wires associates with an iPod.
And if you don’t like the frames offered by Blue Shark, you can even send in a frame you do like and they will custom fit a lens (prescription or not) for those frames.

Another strong selling point of the Blue Shark brand is the availability of prescription eyewear.  Simply fill out the order form, and provide a copy of your current eyewear prescription, and the company will make a pair of medical quality sunglasses for any user.  I personally wear bifocals, and I have long been relegated to either my normal prescription sunglasses, cheap clip-ons, or having a poker film applied to my glasses.  It is nice to see at least one poker eyewear company understand the needs of their customers and provide this service.

While the Blue Shark Optics prices were higher than the rest, the quality and effectiveness of their product certainly warranted the price difference. Their frames are made of high quality acetate and not cheap plastic.  Starting at $129 ($169 for the MP3 Tiger Shark), the Blue Shark product should be seen as an investment rather than an expense.  These glasses can not only be worn at the poker table, but are perfect for night driving, as well as to reduce eyestrain for computer users.  Sure, you might look silly wearing sunglasses while multi-tabling at Full Tilt, but your eyes will thank you for thinking of them.
Blue Shark even offers free shipping and a money back guarantee.  And professional players like John “The Razor”  Phan, Young Phan and Kathy Liebert are winning while wearing them, which is more than can be said for the other brands.

So in the end, the three reviewers were all unanimous in their choice of Blue Shark Optics as their preference.  The slight increase in cost was more than offset by the comfort, quality, and multi-functionality of the product. The bottom line is that Blue Shark Optics deliver what they promise, with a lens that, unlike the others, completely hides the eyes.  And in the end, as we were comparing them for poker play, the others weren’t even close.  So when you are ready to step up your game, I highly recommend you do so in Blue Shark Optics eyewear.  Professional poker players across the spectrum have made them their personal choice, and I believe that you should too.

Now I know this is coming across like a commercial for Blue Shark Optics, but I want to make it clear that we conducted a comparison with real players, in real money games.  The players weren’t told which brand they should choose, but they all chose Blue Shark Optics anyway.  Since I have long felt that Blue Shark Optics were the best on the market, I was very happy to see the three players make the same decision while wearing them under real tournament conditions.

You could be posting your articles on the Poker Bankroll Blog. Read all about it here.

Check out our Poker Freeroll and Tournament League.

Tags: Poker Articles, Poker Tools

Calculating Bankroll Requirements

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 | Poker Articles, Poker Bankroll Management, Poker Mathematics, Poker Tools | 2 Comments

Submitted by Scott McIntosh, this article belongs to the Poker Bankroll Management series

In gambling games such as poker, blackjack or video poker where the player is trying to make money not only is it important to be playing with a positive expectation but also much care must be taken not to lose all of one’s money. As the saying goes – “It takes money to make money”. This requires winning players to maintain a certain amount of money in reserve to handle losing streaks and is commonly known as the player’s “bankroll”. This article will explore how to estimate the amount of money that is required to be kept as a poker bankroll in order to play so as reduce the probability of going broke to an acceptable level.

Risk of Ruin Formula (warning serious math content ahead)

The risk of ruin formula is given below. The formula is based on a random walk with upwards drift and has some assumptions that although not exactly correct are good enough that it still gives a good approximation of a poker player’s risk of ruin. These assumptions include: a) normal distribution of results b) constant win rate and standard deviation. If the actual parameters vary too far from these assumptions care must be taken as the formula is likely to underestimate the actual risk of ruin.

Risk of Ruin = e ^ (-2WB / (S ^ 2))

e = Constant (2.718281828)
W = Win Rate, measured in $ pr. hour
S = Variance (has a unit that doesn’t really make any logical sense)
B = Bankroll, measured in $
^ = Power symbol (e.g. 3^2 = 9; 3^4 = 81)
/ = Division Symbol (e.g. 24/6 = 4; 56/7 = 8 )

Reference : D. Schlesinger, Blackjack Attack, RGE publ., Oakland 1997 (2nd ed. 2000)

Note: A player’s win rate and standard deviation is usually obtained from a Poker Database program such as “Poker Tracker”.

Example

Given a winning poker player with win rate of $30/hour, standard deviation of $600 and bankroll of $15000:

Risk of ruin = e ^ (-2*30*15000/(600^2))
Risk of ruin = 8.208500%

Although this is a precise answer given to 6 decimal places it is only an approximation and probably would be rounded up to give a 10% risk of ruin in practice.

What Risk of Ruin should you accept?

One can never eliminate the risk of going broke, that is reducing the risk of ruin to 0%. Whilst 5% might be acceptable to a part time player, a professional whose only source of income is from poker should use something like a conservative 1% risk of ruin. Also given the error likely in measuring the win rate and standard deviation and also changing table conditions one should maintain a higher bankroll than calculated.

This article was written by Scott McIntosh of ReviewPoker Rooms which has a Bankroll Calculator based on the formula given above.

You could be posting your articles on the Poker Bankroll Blog. Read all about it here.

Tags: Poker Articles, Poker Bankroll Management, Poker Mathematics, Poker Tools

Pokerlistings.com review

Sunday, March 29th, 2009 | Poker Articles, Poker Tools | 3 Comments

This article belongs to the Poker Tools series

Introduction to the Pokerlistings.com website

Almost every online site about poker, from the smallest blogs to the biggest online poker guides, is involved with affiliated promotional deals in one way or another.  Affiliation deals are one of the primary ways of converting online traffic to an income.  Basically, online sites selling a product or offering a service will pay other websites what’s known as a CPA (Cost per Action) for each person referred who buys a product or signs up to a service. This basic principle of generating an income is also utilized at Pokerlistings.com. 

What sets Pokerlistings.com apart from the jungle of online sites promoting poker sites is the sheer amount of relevant and qualitative poker information they offer. Pokerlistings.com is basically a complete online poker guide and one of the largest of it’s kind.  Additionally, due to their size Pokerlistings.com are able to offer better poker sign up bonuses than other affiliation sites.

In this review I will focus on the features I like the best on the Pokerlistings.com website and also mention some of the annoyances I experienced while navigating the site.

Pokerlistings.com features, Market Pulse

The Market Pulse page keeps track of the online poker performances of 3645961 (and counting) poker players. Here’s a list of some of the information available on the Market Pulse page:

• Browse the top 100 online poker winners and losers sorted by day, week, month, year, poker room, game type and stakes.
• Check the online poker traffic report to find out which sites are most popular
• Find the biggest pots won online sorted by day, week, month, year, poker room, game type and stakes
• Use the Real-Time table finder to find exactly the cash game, poker tournament or poker freeroll you are looking for
• Check out how the famous players are doing on the tables
• Use the Online Poker Player search to find information on your opponents (players are divided into 9 categories: calling station, bomb, rock, shark, mouse, warning, maniac, red fish and green fish)
• Browse the Market Pulse player statistics section to find information on Highest BB/100 players, Lowest BB/100 players, Highest VP$IP players and much more

As a fun side note I entered my online nick in the Online Poker Player search and found some data on my early fixed limit days on Party Poker. Turns out I’m a green fish only slightly higher rated than the calling station. The advice presented to me was to “grow some balls”…LOL. I hope I have improved since then.

Pokerlistings.com features, Poker Players

The Poker Players page features a database of 15346 high profile poker players. Each player profile features:

• Detailed biography
• Recent tournament placements
• Player statistics
• Player analysis by Barry Greenstein
• Player photos

My only encounter with poker stardom was on the Carribean Poker Classic 2008 where I played in a couple of tournaments where Juha Helppi was also playing. I have heard that Gus Hansen trained for his boxing match against Theo Jørgensen in a small boxing club on Østerbro (Copenhagen, Denmark) so perhaps I will bump into him one day if he decides to enter another fight.

Pokerlistings.com features, Live Tournaments

Very extensive live updates, blogs, interviews and TV from all the major live poker tournament events.  I especially like the Pokerlisting’s Live Tournament Coverage calendar which gives a fast overview of upcoming tournaments.

Pokerlistings.com features, Poker Strategy

A poker article database containing 386 poker strategy articles (the pokerbankrollblog has 200 articles now for comparison:-)) written by poker pros. The poker strategy articles are divided into the following categories:

• Beginner poker strategy
• General poker strategy
• Cash game no limit hold’em strategy
• Poker theory
• Psychology of poker
• Seven-card stud strategy
• Cash game limit hold’em strategy
• Tournament no limit hold’em
• Bankroll management
• Omaha
• Poker math

I think I might read through the Cash game section one day when I have time as I feel this is the weakest part of my game (my friend Artur will definitely agree with me on this one; he was appalled by my lack of cash game skills on the Caribbean Poker Classic cruise)

Pokerlistings.com features, Blogs

Being an avid blogger myself it was fun to read through some of the poker pro blogs on the Pokerlistings.com Blog page. In addition to their own team of poker pros, Pokerlistings.com also have a number of guest bloggers including Anette Obrestad. Anette is famous among other things for winning an online poker tournament with tape across her computer monitor so she couldn’t see her own cards. You may ask why I’m interested in Anette Obrestad. Here’s the thing. Recently I made my own Twitter profile and have become quite the Twitter aficionado. I noticed that Anette also has a Twitter profile and have added her on several occasions. Not once has she returned the favour and added me to her Twitter followers!!! So Anette if you are reading this I just wanted to let you know that I’m very disappointed in you for not following me on Twitter, especially since you speak so highly of Twitter in your latest blog entry.  

Pokerlistings.com annoyances

I really dislike the entire top part of the menu below the header on the front page:

I get that Pokerlistings make money by promoting poker rooms (and in fact their poker room reviews are actually quite good). What I don’t get is why they think it’s necessary to use most of their top menu space to display the same poker room reviews organized in 8 different ways. All they achieve by doing this is adding to the unorganized feel of the page and increasing the difficulties navigating around.

This leads me directly on to my main critique of the Pokerlistings page: the information overload. It’s a double edged sword, because the massive amount of (mostly good) information on the site is also what sets it in a league of its own. Nevertheless, there is so much information crammed onto their site that it takes a couple of hours to figure out where the good stuff is. My personal taste is that I do not like websites that fail to present their information in a clear manner. Having said that, the pages I have mentioned in this review are actually quite well made and easy to navigate, so if you stick to them and don’t get lost in the poker room review jungle you should be fine.

You could be posting your articles on the Poker Bankroll Blog. Read all about it here.

Tags: Poker Articles, Poker Tools

Online poker tournament statistics: cummulative blinds

Sunday, March 8th, 2009 | Poker Articles, Poker Mathematics, Poker Tools | 4 Comments

This article is a part of the Poker Mathematics series.

Recently I have wondered if it is possible to calculate the probability of winning a poker tournament based on which strategy you use and how your all in moves are distributed. During the process of collecting data to solve this problem I have run into some interesting observations which I would like to share with you.

Check out the previous post in this series: Online poker tournament statistics: player exit percentage

Having discovered a relationship between player exit percentage and the time any given tournament has been running for, the next step in calculating the probability of winning a poker tournament was to estimate the cumulative amount of blinds payed for any given period of time a poker tournament has been running for.

Just to remind you, the calculations shown below are based on the blind structure of FTP (Full Tilt Poker) regular tournaments with 10 minute blind levels (I’ve only included the first 10 levels )

In order to calculate the amount of blinds payed pr. level shown in the table above, I estimated a total of 10 rounds played pr. level. Because FTP tables are 9 handed the assumption of 10 rounds pr. level means that on average a player will pay the blinds a little more than once pr. level; 1,11 times to be exact.

Summing the “Blinds pr. level” over the “Tournament duration” up to blind level 34 led to the following table:

I myself was quite amazed when I saw these numbers. 866000 chips payed in total blinds for a 6 hour tournament. That’s a lot of chips!!!!

To have some sort of reference I wanted to calculate how many successive all ins you would need to win to pay these blinds. To keep things as simple as possible I assumed that each all in would double the  1500 chip starting stack. According to this assumption, 2 successive all in wins  increase your stack from 1500 to 6000, 3 successive all inn wins from 1500 to 12000 and so on.

The rounded necessary all in wins are shown in the table above (the precice numbers in brackets). Luckily it only takes roughly 9 successive all ins to win 866000 chips….aren’t you relieved:-)

I am now ready to calculate the probability of winning an online poker tournament, but you will have to wait until my next article to find out what it is.

You could be posting your articles on the Poker Bankroll Blog. Read all about it here.

Tags: Poker Articles, Poker Mathematics, Poker Tools

Poker Team Bankroll

Thursday, March 5th, 2009 | Poker Articles, Poker Projects, Poker Tools | 6 Comments

Submitted by Matt Gai this article belongs to the Poker Project series

Free web-based service for turning your home poker game into an enterprising partnership with your friends

This article explains the history, features and strategy behind pokerteambankroll.com

The idea was spawned as my friend and I were talking during a car ride down to Atlantic City for a poker tournament over a year ago. He said to me, “We should get everyone in our home game to pool our money together so we can play in big tournaments like a World Poker Tour (WPT) Championship and the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event!” That was all it took to get the wheels spinning.

The very next week I drafted up the concept on paper so all of the home game players could get on the same page. I laid it out for everyone. Our team goal was to put together enough money for one $10,000 buyin to the WSOP Main Event for one of us, plus $1,000 for 1 Main Event Satellite buyin for a second player, plus $2,000 for travel, food and lodging expenses for both. $13,000 in all.

In order to reach our goal, we were going to follow this plan…
Any profit made in our home game could be contributed to our team bankroll in exchange for an equal number of points. I would collect the money from each player and record an equal number of points on paper (e.g. $82 profit contributed = 82 points recorded). I then put the money in a savings account that I set up just for this. We did this every week – and we still do. Anyway, every week, profits are contributed and points are given. And it adds up quickly!

The idea is, when we reach our goal, whoever has the most points will take $11,000 from the bankroll and use it to travel to Las Vegas to play in in the World Series of Poker Main Event, poker’s most prestigious tournament. Our team member with the 2nd most number of points will take $2,000 from the bankroll, travel to Las Vegas and play in a satellite tournament to try to win a seat in the Main Event. If that player wins a seat, then the team will have 2 players in the Main Event, thereby doubling our chances of cashing.

Here’s the best part, and you may have guessed it already, but, if either player cashes any money in the Main Event, everyone who contributed to the team bankroll will be paid out according to their percentage of contributions. For example, if the point leader, who contributed $3,500 in profits to the team bankroll, which is 27% of $13,000, cashes $100,000 in the tournament, he or she wins $27,000. The rest is paid out accordingly.

What this means is that everyone has a shot to win big money, regardless of how much you contribute. Take this hypothetical example: Player B has the least amount of points contributed (130), which translates to a 1% share in the bankroll. If the point leader wins the WSOP Main Event and cashes $10 million, player B wins $100,000. Not bad for a $130 investment!

So here’s where the web site comes in. I got tired of recording everything on paper, and so, being a webmaster, I decided that the best way to keep track of all of our activity would be online. That way, everything got recorded safe and sound, anyone on the team could easily check their statistics at any time, and everyone would always know where they stood with respect to the goal. We started recording and tracking every single buyin, cashout and contribution for every weekly home game on the website.

From there I starting adding features like a message board, photos, avatars, event selection, goal management, team management, emailing and more. It became so useful and so integral to our team that I decided to put it out there for the entire world to use.

Now anyone can create a private team on pokerteambankroll.com and use it to turn their home game into a big tournament team effort – and transform their home game players into poker super stars – all for free. Good luck!

Post by Matt.

You could be posting your articles on the Poker Bankroll Blog. Read all about it here.

Tags: Poker Articles, Poker Projects, Poker Tools

Online poker tournament statistics: player exit percentage

Sunday, March 1st, 2009 | Poker Articles, Poker Mathematics, Poker Tools | 7 Comments

This article is a part of the Poker Mathematics series.

Recently I have wondered if it is possible to calculate the probability of winning a poker tournament based on which strategy you use and how your all in moves are distributed. During the process of collecting data to solve this problem I have run into some interesting observations which I would like to share with you (warning: math content ahead). First a little teaser….my findings indicate that it is possible to make good mathematical estimations on how many hours it will take before the final table in a tournament is reached based on the number of players registered for the tournament:

In the table below you will get a feel for how many hours you will have to play to reach the final table based on the number of players registered.

In the following table you will get a feel for the size of tournament you should choose given the time you have available.

Here’s a recollection of how I calculated the numbers above:

My tournament statistics project is based on online poker tournaments at Fulltilt poker and more precisely freezeout tournaments (i.e no rebuys and add ons). First of all, I came to realize that I would need to be able to estimate the number of players in an MTT given the time it takes for the tournament to finish. For example if a tournament lasts 3 hours, how many players were registered to play in it from the beginning?

What I did was to note down the following information for 25 online poker freezeout tournament on Fulltilt poker:

• The time the tournament had been running
• The number of players registered
• The number of players remaining

From this data set I was able to calculate the exit percentages, that is the relative number in percent of player exits, and plot them against the time the tournaments had been running. For example, in one tournament running for 3 hours and 28 minutes, 611 players registered and of them 25 remained yielding an exit percentage 95,9%.

Player exit percentage raw data

I was quite surprised to see the raw data plot shown above because it indicates an exponential mathematical relationship between the exit percentage and the time an online freezeout tournament has been running for. This relationship seems to be independent of the buyin of the tournament and the number of players entering.

I transferred the raw data to Origin and did a peak fit analysis to determine the mathematical relationship between the exit percentage (EP) and the hours played (x). Based on my original data set I imposed the following boundary conditions:

• EP(x=0)=0% : No players exit the tournament before it starts
• EP(x=6 hours) = 100% : All the freezeout tournaments I sampled had ended within 6 hours

Player exit percentage fitted data

Turned out the relationship was exponential as expected:

• EP(x) = A(1-exp(-Bx)), in this case A was 99,5 and B was 0,96

Now here comes Now here comes the interesting part. Given the equation above, relating the exit percentage with the number of hours played, it is now possible to estimate both the hours it takes a tournament to finish and the inverse, namely the number of players entering into a tournament given the hours it takes to finish.

Since I’m not able to paste Excel formulas into Wordpress blog posts, I have made some tables with some sample data just to give you an idea of how you can use the formula.

In the table below you will get a feel for how many hours you will have to play to reach the final table based on the number of players registered.

In the following table you will get a feel for the size of tournament you should choose given the time you have available.

Hope you found the information in this article useful. If you have any comments or want a copy of the Excel spreadsheet I used to calculate the data in the tables, please let me know.

You could be posting your articles on the Poker Bankroll Blog. Read all about it here.

Tags: Poker Articles, Poker Mathematics, Poker Tools