In Finding Poker Leaks Part 1 I talked about how to use Hold’em Manager to find leaks in your c-betting strategy.  In the second part of this series of an undetermined size, I’m going to talk about analyzing your line to find out if your line has a good risk-to-reward ratio.  Like the C-betting article, this one was also inspired by Jason Ho over at Stoxpoker.  I highly recommend you sign up and watch his videos.  It’ll be well worth the money.  Enough ass kissing.  On with the show.

Here’s what you’ll need to analyze your line:

A program like Hold’em Manager or PokerTracker3 that’ll give you stats on your villain

A program like FlopZilla or Pokerazor to show you how often your villain’s range hits

This .xlsx file that I made from watching Jason Ho’s video

The hand history you want to analyze

Step 1

Grab the hand history you want to analyze.  And look up the villains VPIP stats and C-bet percentage in Hold’em Manager or PokerTracker3.

Step 2

Select your villains range (VPIP) in FlopZilla or Pokerazor as well as the flop cards and run an analysis to see what percentage of the time he makes certain hands with that range.

Step 3

Insert the percentages from Step 2 on the Excel spreadsheet as well as the villain’s C-bet percentage.

Step 4

Fill in the pre-flop, flop, turn, and river bets on the Excel spreadsheet.

Step 5

Enter the possible lines you could take (check/call, check/call, check/fold; check/call, check/raise, bet; etc.) in the designated are on the spreadsheet.  Then enter the minimum and maximum loss/gain that each line could give you.

Step 6

Using the percentages you got from Flopzilla/Pokerazor and your opponents actions, decide which line gives you the best return on investment.

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I realize these steps are a little vague if you’ve never done this before, but I promise that once you get the hang of it you’ll be able to find the most profitable line in any given situation and spot a ton of post-flop leaks in your game.  If you want to see a video version of this, you can sign up at Stoxpoker and watch Jason Ho’s videos.  When you do, you’ll understand why I have such a bro-ner for the guy.  He’s a genius.

This is the first part of a series of articles on poker leaks that I really don’t know when I’m going to end.  Hold’em Manager has features that I only dreamt of when I was using PokerTracker3.  To begin, I’m going to go over how to use Hold’em Manager to find poker leaks in a C-betting strategy.

Your Poker Game

Most people C-bet too often.  If you c-bet more than 80% of the time, I’d say you probably fall into this category.  But when should you c-bet and when should you check fold.  Before we go any further I have to say that if you ever check/fold after you raise pre-flop, you must check/raise occasionally to balance your line.  If you don’t balance your line, you’ll be too readable to a thinking opponent. That said; here’s how to analyze your c-bet strategy.

Step 1

Open Hold’em Manager and go to the Cash or Tourney tab (whichever one you want to analyze) then click the “Filter” button on the top right.

Step 2

Click the “More Filters” tab and add the following filters:

PFR=True

Called Preflop 3-bet=False

Faced Preflop 3-bet=False

Allin Preflop=False

Flop Continuation Bet Made=True

Then click “Save and Close.”

Step 3

Run your reports.

A good report to look at is the Plugged Leaks 03 – Flopped hand strength report.  You can see how much you’re profiting/losing when you flop certain hands.

If you’re a member of Stoxpoker, you can download several other kickass reports from Jason Ho’s videos.  One report that’s incredibly useful is the Stoxpoker Bucket by Hole Cards report.  This will show you your profit/loss based on your holdings.  It kicks the crap out of the Plugged Leaks report.  It’s worth subscribing just for the reports and filters that Jason Ho gives you.  I highly recommend them.  The videos are also excellent.

Step 4

Play with it a little.  Look at the hands where you saw a turn (saw turn=true) and where you didn’t see a turn (saw turn=false).  You can also check how profitable your double-barreling strategy is by adding (turn continuation bet made=true).  There’s a lot you can learn.

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Just another word of caution, if you’re analyzing a tournament you should filter your results by the number of players left so your results aren’t skewed by heads-up matches.  Other than that, enjoy and let me know if this helps you!

Last month I wrote an article describing how poker leaks develop, but I never gave any specific examples of what kind of play could be a leak and that’s why I wanted to write this article.

About a week or so ago, I was looking at my poker graph and thinking, “Holy shit!  This thing’s got more peaks than the Rockies!”  My overall win rate was positive, but there were some brutal swings in my chart.  I knew I had a leak somewhere.  I just needed to find it.

The leak wasn’t hard to find.  It was HUGE, but it still surprised me.  My leak was accepting coin flips during the early blind stage of Sit N Goes.

After I became aware of my leak I started paying more attention to my opponents and realized that I wasn’t alone.  The coin flip leak is common.  Here’s what happens.

The blinds are 30/60 and you’re in the cutoff with AKo.  You have 1760 chips.  UTG limps and UTG+1 raises to 240 and everyone else folds to you.  UTG+1 has 1575 left.

You re-raise to 600 and it folds back to UTG+1 who thinks for a couple of seconds, then shoves all-in.  You call and UTG+1 shows 99.  It’s a classic race situation.

Hands like this happen all the time in low-to-mid limit Sit N Goes and I’d argue it’s a major leak in most players’ games.

There was no reason for this stack-off.  The blinds were low and both players were in fairly good shape before the hand yet each one was willing to risk their entire tournament on a coin flip.

This kind of play is fine when the blinds are high or a player is short-stacked because your opponent’s range is much wider in these situations and AK or a pocket pair may be big favorites.  However, when the blinds are low your aggression should be low.

In my opinion, the player with AKo should have called or put in a smaller raise.  The player with Ace-King had a strong hand and position and could have outplayed his opponent or gotten away easy if his opponent showed a lot of strength.  This player’s raise and the subsequent re-raise all-in took away the positional advantage he would have had if he just called.

Since I started declining coin flips, I’ve noticed two things.  The first is that I money more frequently and my graph is more stable.  But I’ve also noticed that I finish 3^rd or 2^nd more often because I’m usually playing a smallish stack after the bubble.  However, I think the latter is more due to less-than-optimal bubble play than failing to build a big stack early.

If you think you’re a better player than most of the field, there’s no reason to grab a small edge when the blinds are low.  Play solid poker early on and save the gambling for when the blinds justify the risk.

Do you notice a lot of swings in your bankroll?  I do.  I’ll run hot for a while and post a solid ROI and then I’ll go on a bender and lose a good portion of it.  At that point, I do what most of us do.  I take a break from poker, relax and maybe read a few poker books.  A month or so later I’m back in the mix and winning again.

At first I thought I was experiencing natural ups and downs.  But then I realized what was really happening.

After carefully analyzing my last few boom-and-bust cycles I noticed that I slowly picked up bad habits and sprung poker leaks.  I’d make increasingly loose calls and increasingly loose re-raises.  Soon my usual winning play would go out the window and it would be replaced with some bastardized donkey-style poker.  It’s happening to you too- slowly, but it’s happening.  Unless you analyze your game constantly for these little leaks, your game will degrade until it breaks and you become a losing player.

Why The Hell Does This Happen?

My “ah ha” moment came when I remembered a classic study on superstition from my behavioral psychology class.  For those of you who don’t know a lot about behavior psychology, it’s based on the premise that we will repeat behaviors that are rewarded and stop behaviors that are punished.  In this study B.F. Skinner explored what would happen if he gave pigeons a reward at random intervals regardless of their behavior.  The results were interesting.

Some birds would constantly bob their heads, some would lift their legs and others would spin in circles.  When a bird was reinforced, they associated the reward with the behavior they were doing at the time and that caused them to perform that behavior more often.  If the bird was rewarded while bobbing its head, it bobbed its head more often which increased the chance that the food would come while its head was bobbing.  The head-bobbing behavior would be reinforced to the point where the bird constantly bobbed its head.

Soon Skinner had cages full of pigeons performing ridiculous antics believing that these behaviors would get them food.

What Does This Have To Do With Poker?

We all have friends that have favorite hands.  A good friend of mine always plays 7-4 because he won the biggest pot of his life with that hand.  I also played with a couple of guys who swore that J-9 always hit.  Stories like Doyle Brunson’s legendary 10-2 only serve to reinforce these superstitions.

You Think This Doesn’t Apply To You?

Most solid players are good enough to know better than to play trash hands “just because,” but superstitious behavior can develop in other ways.

Let’s say you’re playing in a Sit ‘N Go and you’re having a hard time.  All the hands you raise pre-flop miss on the flop and all your continuation bets get raised.  It happens to all of us and it sucks.  What do you do when it happens to you?

I’m willing to bet you stop raising so much.  You start to limp with hands that you’d usually raise and you stop c-betting on flops you miss.  You become a passive player because your correct plays are being punished.

On the other hand, let’s say you’ve won a couple of nice pots by re-raising outside of your usual range.  You start to think you’ve found a cool tweak to your game and you start re-raising more often.  Soon your opponents catch on and start playing back at you.  All of the sudden, you’re hemorrhaging money.  After a while, you’re beaten into submission and fall into a passive playing style causing you to continue your losing streak.

See what I’m saying?

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It’s in our nature to increase the frequency of behaviors that are rewarded and decrease the frequency of behaviors that are punished, but that tendency can hurt you in poker.  Poker has an element of luck in it that occasionally rewards poor play and punishes good play.  The luck factor throws us off and makes us pick up bad habits that, if left unchecked, will wreck your game and send you into a downswing.  Take time out of your week to analyze your games, both winning and losing, to see if you’re picking up any bad habits.  Fix your leaks before they become serious and you’ll save yourself a lot of headache and money.