In his Little Gold Book: Advanced Lessons for Mastering Poker 2.0, Phil Gordon recommends using a HUD when playing online software. He mostly talks of Hold’em Manager, as he in using Windows. For us Mac OS X users, here is how you can set up the Poker Copilot for HUD according to Phil’s approach:
I recommend Phil Gordon’s Little Gold Book for a good description of how to interpret various ranges of HUD statistics.
Poker Copilot 3.10 is now available to download.
Unfortunately the auto-updater embedded in 3.09 is not working correctly, so you’ll need to do this update manually.
What’s changed:
Known problem:
This update needs to update your database. To see the new stats for your historical data, use “Tools” -> “Recalculate Statistics” in Poker Copilot’s menu.
Update Instructions:
Now you are done and ready to hit the tables.
Crushing the Microstakes is the name of an e-book I just finished reading. Highly recommended. It’s written by Nathan Williams, a person who has done exactly what the title of the book says. It’s also formatted to be read on a computer screen – large fonts, in a PDF in landscape orientation.
Here is Nathan’s recommend HUD setup for playing microstakes cash games:
If you want to try out all the delicious new statistics coming to the next Poker Copilot update, you can have a sneak preview already. Download and install this update to try out the stats. Go to the “Advanced Statistics” Dashboard, and then on the toolbar, click on the new “Show statistics by position” View button.
All of the new statistics can be added to the HUD, using the preferences.
Upon opening this update for the first time Poker Copilot will update your database. This may take some time.
Please post feedback in the Poker Copilot discussion forum.
This is question you MUST be asking as a Poker Copilot user: can I trust the HUD data for a specific player? The answer is, it depends on how many hands you have AND which statistic you are looking at.
Most statistics in Poker Copilot are calculated by dividing a numerator by a denominator. For example, Voluntarily Put $ in Pot (VPiP) is calculated as follows:
Voluntarily put $ in pot % =
times voluntarily put $ in pot * 100
/ hands played
If you’ve played 20 to 25 hands or so, you can consider this to be statistically significant. This is why Poker Copilot’s HUD initially shows statistics for a new player in grey, only switching to full-colour after you’ve collected 25 hands against that player.
The calculation for Folded to Four-bet Preflop (F4B) is
Folded to four-bet preflop % =
times folded to four-bet preflop * 100
/ number of opportunities to fold to
four-bet preflop
For this to be as statistically significant as VPiP after 25 hands, you need to play enough hands for the denominator to be >= 25. That is, 25 opportunities to fold to a preflop 4bet. How many hands is that? At full-ring microstakes No-Limit Hold’em, probably around 4500 hands.
As such I consider a stat such as F4B to be far more useful for analysing your own game, rather than making a decision about a villain. Before you made a decision based on an opponent’s F4B stat you should definitely click on their HUD panel to bring up the pop-up panel which has full information. In dark grey you’ll see the numbers behind the stat. Make sure that the denominator is at least 20 or so before using the stat to make a critical decision.
You can see in the screenshot above that after 1,100 hands, that all the denominators are large enough except for “Folded to four-bet preflop”, “Folded big blind to steal attempt”, and “Folded to continuation bet on turn”. Here is a good rule of thumb for full-ring No Limit Hold’em for the most important stats:
Stats reliable after 25 hands: Voluntarily put $ in pot (VPIP), Preflop raised (PFR)
Stats reliable after 150 hands: Aggression (Agg), Three-bet preflop (3bet)
Stats reliable after 500 hands: Continuation bet on flop (CBET), Folded to three-bet preflop (F3B)
Stats reliable after 1000 hands: Continuation bet on turn (TCBET), Four-bet preflop (F4B)
With less than this, be cautious, double-check the denominators, and use your own judgement about the player based on the stats that already are statistically significant.
In 6-max and heads-up, these statistics will become statistically significant quicker.
I went on a statistic-adding rampage today:
But that’s not all. Two new toolbar buttons allow you to turn on/off:
* VPIP/PFR by position
* the numbers behind the statistics, where appropriate.
There’s still plenty to do before I can release an update with these changes, as well as a lot of testing. Additionally I need to make sure performance is still acceptable with 30 new database fields per player and game needed for these changes. If you have 100,000 full-ring hands in your database, that’s roughly 30 million new pieces of information to store in the database.
In the last couple of weeks I tried an experiment with blog comments. They would go to the discussion forum as well as displaying on the blog posts. However it seems that the provider of our discussion forum still has some quality-control work to do with this feature. I’ve now gone back to the old commenting approach.
Sorry to anyone who has been confused as to the mismanagement of blog comments lately. Things are now back to normal.
This is important. The Two Plus Two Poker Forum has been hacked, and any email/password combination you used there is now vulnerable. Read more here:
Today I made internal adjustments to Poker Copilot so that it can calculate VPIP by position:
This is how Poker Copilot’s “More” -> “Advanced” filter currently looks in my office.
There’s a lot of work still to get this ready for you to use though. Some screens will need to be redesigned and tested.
After today’s update to fix a Winamax issue, a satisfied customer writes:
Bonjour,
Je tenais à écrire à ce mot pour vous exprimer ma pleine satisfaction de votre service clientèle et de vos collaborateurs.
A chaque sollicitation de ma part, j’ai toujours eu une réponse rapide, agréable, claire et une solution. Et tout malgré mes mails écrits en français ! A regret mais mon anglais est très basique et les traducteurs existant ne sont pas très efficace.
Encore une fois, félicitations pour votre réactivité, efficacité et courtoisie de votre service clientèle.
Merci,
With Google Translate I got the gist, and it was pleasant. That’s the thing when something goes wrong in your business; it gives you the chance to turn unhappy people into happy people.