BB/hand per starting hand: any references?

[Thrakkar]

I try to find leaks regarding my starting hands by looking at the money I won/lost with them (BB/hand). AA is the most profitable with 4.2 BB/hand and it goes down from there.

But is that a good value? Are there any benchmarks available how profitable the starting hand combinations SHOULD be?

Thanks,
Thomas

[Buzz-cp]

Thrakker,

The problem we've seen is, that each hand has such a small sample, that the winrates are hard to pin down with reasonable confidence. A hand like AA will converge fast, but AQo not so fast. For example, my winrate for KQs (dealt 229/76K times) is higher than AKo (715/76K times), even though AKo>KQs.

Buzz

[milesdyson]

4.2 bb/hand is running hot with aces. it should be high 2s, maybe very low 3s.

[Eeegah]

No one knows. Serious.

If the winrate for all your hands total doesn't converge to a meaningful number after 50k hands, how many hands will you need to play until your winrate with AKs converges? Don't bother with the math here, as it's meaningless as well; by the time you've played enough hands to pretend to make a judgement you won't be playing the same limits or the same way.

[bags]

I imagine it would take an extremely large amount of hands for those numbers to converge on what you can expect to see so I'm not sure that is the best way to find a leak.

I suppose you might find a glaring weakness if you overplaying a specific hand, but I think it will be tough to find a leak with a solid preflop hand based on those numbers unless you have a ton of hands played.

I don't know how many hands you have played so you might have a solid representation, but I would likely think that most of the people around here do not have enough hands played to give good numbers around this.

You are probably better off looking at the way you played certain pocket hands and if you see a trend that you are not sure about then post the hands to see if you played correctly.

[Absolution]

Ya, the best you could do is to group similar hands together and look at those numbers. For example, you may group KQs, QJs, KJs, ATs and AJs. Still not super accurate, but you might play those hands similarly in most situations and they have similar characteristics.

[kerowo]

I don't know that win rate per hand is very meaningful. I've had stretches where AA wins the blinds 4 or 5 times out of 11. I think win % with the hand is a better indicator. After 87k hands AA is winning around 76% of the time. I'm at work and don't remember the rest but it drops off to JJ winning around 50% of the time. Win percentage more than anything else taught me that QJ sucked when I was first starting to use PT, before I found the starting hand chart.

[AJay]

It doesn't address the win rate per hand, but every hand that you play, that's not played from the blinds, should be profitable. If it's not, why are you playing it?!

Of course, if you only have 10 samples for KJs, you can't really say with any confidence that you're playing it well or poorly just by looking at the BB/100 numbers. But you could, perhaps group the low pairs, for example. Do you make money off of them, for example?

I'd just concern myself with trying to make all of my hands positive BB/100. And yes, I want AA to be above 1BB/100, but trying to get very specific with exactly how positive the numbers are won't get you anywhere.

[kerowo]

At about 10k hands you will see if you print out the general table, the one with all the starting hands, that only about 20% of the starting hands make money. Pages of red numbers. The more you play the more they will lose. Again, thinking every hand you play will make money isn't very sensible, but you should be making money from every position (except the blinds) you play in by 10k hands.

[prohornblower]

I used to have a sheet of paper from the internet that listed each hands EV in terms of BB.

IIRC, AA was about 3.27 or so. Every other hand was in the 2's or lower.

I think maybe Lou Krieger wrote somethign about it. Google his name and see what you come up with. I would agree with the Beraducator, in saying that anything above 4 is hot with AA. Paris Hilton would agree "that's hot".