how to find the leaks in my game

[ATM]

How do i Figure out what leaks i have and when i do find them how do i go about fixing them. what if its like a bad habit that you struggle to get rid of.

[uDevil]

Offhand, I can think of 4 ways:

1. Learn how and why good players play by reading books or strategy posts. If you play differently without a good reason, that's probably a leak.

2. See if you have the most common and well known leaks such as overly loose and passive play. That is, playing too many hands, drawing without odds, and failing to protect your hands by appropriate betting and especially raising.

3. Hand review and analysis. Go over your hands and look for mistakes. Identify patterns.

4. Use PokerTracker to follow the money-- hands or situations in which you lose more than you should or fail to win as much as you could.

I'm trying to figure out how to do #4 in some sort of organized way, but not much luck so far.

[Pvnuts]

You're number 4 point is something I putting some thought on last night. I'm a novice limit player with a little over 4000 hands recorded in Poker Tracker and Poker Office. I was and still am concerened about the amount of money I loose with Top Pair. I'm not sure what the numbers should be there and whether a larger red number is normal for this hand. Either I'm playing them too hard and failing to fold them when I know I'm beat or it's normal to have a higher loss with them since many turn into a bigger hand and pay you off....

Udevil... is there a way that Poker Tracker can tell you when top pair turned into something bigger and more profitable? I was thinking of doing the following...

1. Find out what the odds of top pair turning into two pair or trips ect... after the flop if you keep playing your hand till the end... (within reason of course)
2. Take the total of your top pair and take the percentage out. So if you had top pair 1000 times, and the odds of your hand improving is 30% (I pulled that number out of my ass) then you could assume that you improved 300 times. From there you take the total of the improved hands that can come from top pair and assume that 30% of what you won comes from holding your pair till the river.
3. That number would have to be greater than what you lost with top pair... if it's not, you overplaying....

What do you think... am I missing something? However, I realize that this is not perfect since my sample is small and improved hands still can be beat....

If anyone has a better way of finding out if you're overplaying top pair... please state....

ATM, hope you don't mind me using your post to ask this question... I figured it was related to your question....

[uDevil]

[ QUOTE ]
I'm a novice limit player with a little over 4000 hands recorded in Poker Tracker and Poker Office. I was and still am concerened about the amount of money I loose with Top Pair. I'm not sure what the numbers should be there and whether a larger red number is normal for this hand.


[/ QUOTE ]

Where exactly do you see this red number? If it's in the Misc. Stats tab, do you have the "Show Only Hands That Were Not Folded" box checked? Note that this filter does not work for all sites, so it can be deceptive. Also, PT doesn't distinguish the times you have top pair with the board paired from other "two-pair" hands.

[ QUOTE ]
Udevil... is there a way that Poker Tracker can tell you when top pair turned into something bigger and more profitable?

[/ QUOTE ]

Top pair on the flop should be hugely profitable without improving. PokerTracker's default queries are very limited. You have to write your own database queries to get more specific information. And even then the way the database is set up can make it difficult to filter for specific situations such as you describe.

For instance, PT only records the final value of your hand, and the hand classifications it uses are not that useful. Of course, it does record the flop/turn/river, so you could possibly write a script to do a query, evaluate hands, and then do additional filtering. That's a lot of work but doable.