profiling opponents using PAH (tl, dr)

[sh58]

Profiling opponents using PAH stats


Most SSNLers will use pokertracker and poker ace hud, and there have been many posts about how best to use them in the past. I believe, however, that there is a lot of interesting information you can gather that isn’t so obvious, and is invaluable in judging how to play certain opponents. A lot of this stuff may be known to some players, or be common knowledge, but I hope there are a few bits and bobs that will help people.

It is fairly important to have a fairly large amount of hands on a villain before we can note any patterns, ideally above 1000, but in some cases you can make assumptions based on only a couple of hundred hands.

The players I usually profile are regulars, usually TAG’s, that I will play with a lot. Regs are the best people to profile because you will be playing with them on a frequent basis, you normally have a lot of hands on them (usually datamined), and it isn’t normally obvious at a glance what their leaks are. There is little point doing any detailed analysis of the game of a 70/3/2 who you have 100 hands on, because it is incredibly easy to exploit them, and they aren’t gonna be around very long anyway, so it is pretty much a waste of time.

These are the type of questions I ask myself about a player:

a)is he positionally aware
b)does he raise lightly in late position
c)does he 3bet light out of the blinds
d)does he play back at you a lot when he calls my raises
e)does he doublebarell a lot after raising preflop
f)does he call down light, or bluffcatch the river
g)does he Cbet alot

when you know the answers to these questions, and you have some reads about how the villain played certain hands, you can often tear apart a proficient TAG who doesn’t realise the information you have

The main point in my post is that you can gather general tendancies by combining PAH stats. Here I answer the questions purely using HUD stats.

a)if the fold SB/BB to steal are fairly high, both 70+, his attempt to steal is 25+, it is very likely that he is positionally aware. This is useful to use if you are not sure whether you are facing a Lag or a Lagtard. There are a lot of people at low stakes who have 35/19 vpip/PFR or something similar and you are not sure if they are good or not, well, using the combo stated above, it is very easy to tell.

b)this is just using the attempt to steal stat. It is very important to know this so you can 3bet a bit lighter OOP. Against anyone who has a 30+ attempt to steal you can 3bet a lot of hands for value, KQ for instance. 3betting KQ (for value) might not be such a good idea if their attempt to steal is much lower (>25)

c)this is definitely the most useful one. If villains call PFR % is low (6 or lower is my general rule) but their fold to steal % are also fairly low (75 or less) then they are definitely 3betting light. If there is a villain with less than 5 call PFR and about 70 ish fold to steal% I really attack there 3bets, I will 4bet with whatever trash I am raising straight away, I can also call 3bets and shove in on tonnes of flops if there Cbet % is high.

d)if a villain is raising my Cbets more than 13-14% of the time, I will 3bet bluff a lot against them if they are not maniacs. If it is as high as 20% or higher, then you can stack off a lot lighter on the flop, especially on draw heavy boards. A lot of aggro donks have 20% or higher and you really should not fold good hands when they raise this often.
If there is a reasonable player who raises Cbets a lot, I also will start checking behind more vulnerable hands, such as middle pair, but with floaters it is best to bet the flop with MP and TPNK. Habitual floaters are also easy to spot. Fairly low flop AF, call PFR fairly frequently, and a slightly higher turn AF then you would expect, as well as a fairly low fold to Cbet % (less than 70). Obviously you want to doublebarell or c/r the turn against these villains. Another sign of a villain who might play back at you is a high W$WSF. The higher it is above 40%, the more chance they are playing back at you.

e)if someones turn AF is pretty high (higher than 3) and so is their Cbet frequency, and their go to showdown is fairly low, you can be reasonably confident that this villain will double barell regularly. This means you may want to raise flops against them with vulnerable holdings that can’t take much heat, or you can just call down lighter. Like the last point, a high W$WSF is the sign of a double bareller, who will try and take down more pots.

f)there are a lot of passive river players out there. There river AF will be less than 2, with pretty good hands they will c/c the river a lot to bluffcatch. Here the key is went to showdown, and river AF. Someone with a really high river aggression factor will be bet/folding a tonne of rivers with marginal holdings. Against him, you can obviously bluff raise the river occasionally

g)here just look at the Cbet F%. any higher than 80 and I start bluff raising the flop a lot.

As you can see, there is a lot of information to be gathered that helps a lot in your battles with the regs. An important thing to note is that a lot of their moves will be aimed at you, there fellow good player. They will play much more ABC against the bad players. So some of the stats will be more extreme then they seem. For instance, a villain may Cbet 70% of the time on average. Against a fellow TAG, he is gonna be Cbetting closer to 80 or 90%,and on some boards, he is gonna Cbet every single time. The same goes for stealing blinds, he is gonna steal a lot more against people who have high fold to steal%, and the TAG is going to be the highest by far. So his attempt to steal being 30% really means that when you are in the blinds he is gonna be stealing 40-50% of the time.

I will quickly analyse the stats of a random TAG I picked out during my session this afternoon.


By sh58

so this guy is a 21/15/2.5, so a fairly solid player. just from these 3 stats you can tell he isn't really that aggro. his vpip/PFR ratio has a bit of a gap, so he will be calling PFR's or overlimping slightly more than a 21/18 for instance. his TAF is also less than 3 so we can't expect fireworks every time we are in a pot with him.

his opening range is fairly typical from a TAG, with a 28% attempt to steal, but i wouldn't come after him very light from the blinds, as he is hardly raping us. i think his Cbet % of 69 is hard to exploit, so i wouldn't start c/r him alot when he has the betting lead. i may try and float him sometimes though, as his turn agression isn't that high.

there are some stats that will be useful when we have the betting lead. his fold to Cbet is fairly low and so is his raise Cbet, so i would be very wary if he raised my Cbet, but i think he might float a decent amount. i would doublebarell him alot, but he does have a very high WTSD% of 31 so i would be careful as he has some stationy tendencies

as for 3betting light (the most important thing to know when you play with a TAG), he does have quite low fold stats of 80 and 76, but also a very slightly above average call PFR, so i think he is 3betting slightly light, but nothing too out of line. i wouldn't be too upset about calling a 3bet w KQ and stacking off on a K hi flop, for example.


There are probably tonnes of other things that I either forgot to mention, or haven’t worked out yet. Basically, you can just work out a lot of things just using common sense. None of this information is worked out mathematically, so the ranges I mentioned are just a rough guide that seems to work for me, you guy can make up more accurate ranges if you can be bothered.

I think knowing this stuff will improve your game a lot, as you can start making good money off the regs as well as the fish, or at least avoid getting 3bet to death when you open on the button. every player should look at all the players they play with fairly regularly and do a quick profile so they can react to the flow of the game better, and adjust accordingly. if they take a few notes with villains tendancies based on the HUD stats, it will save alot of time and effort the next time you play them, as you may have forgot what you concluded about them.

feel free to criticise my post, and also add some other useful stat combo's...

[johnnybeef]

Only half way through, but incredibly insiteful so far. Good post!

[Montezuma21]

thanks a lot for doing this. I'm nowhere near having a really good grasp of PT stats (i don't even have most of these up), but i'll be looking back on this thread.

[G-Diddy20]

was just thinking about this the other day. haven't read yet but looks good. thanks

G

[cooker3]

Really good stuff.
Part D is particulary good

1 thing, I regard folding his sb/bb to steal as high with anything over 60 really, 80 I would regard as incredibly high.

[Vacant]

This is terrible, delete right now before anyone else sees it.

[Some9]

I am not yet trying to exploit the regs, but when I have to I will come back and read again [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

nh.

[martijn]

I registered it with my favourites, to look it up a few times more. I've used alot of this before, but there are deffinitly a few great points I've overlooked before.

[Chaos_ult]

Great read, interesting stuff.

[FishSticks]

Nice post