I use Holdem Manager and a Poker HUD when I play online poker. I find it definitely helps especially when I am playing 4 or more tables. I don’t use it like gospel and I make my own reads generally. I find that a lot of people who are starting out at the low levels focus too much on stats – and not enough on situation. I myself do this. So I make a concerted effort to run down a variety of evaluations when I am deciding on a play.

The real big area that I miss this information isn’t in the play once on the table. It’s when selecting a table. I took advantage of IdleMiner for FullTilt and it would run for hours a day and I have a huge database on all the players at my level – and I always mine a few tables at the level above me as well. So very rarely would I sit down at a 6max tables and not have at least 200 hands on at least 5 of the players sitting there. This is HUGE when quickly evaluating the fishyness of a table.

My practice was, if I were playing $10NL on FullTilt, was to open all say 20 tables at the level. Let it run for like 5 or 10 hands and let Holdem Manager update and get going. Then I would filter through the tables by hand and look at the basic table stats – and then the rating on each player – and then lastly on the size of the stacks.

Any table with a VPIP under 30 was immediately closed down. Any table with a PFR% over 10% was closed down. Then of those tables that were left I looked at the ones with the highest average pot. At these tables I would look at what ratings I had for each player at the table. If I saw a 6max table with 4 weak players with at least 1 buy-in I would be mashing the button to get on the waiting list. Generally I didn’t mind if there was one other player that the stats told me was dangerous and a good player. It’s easy enough to avoid these players and still make money off the weak players. But any more then one generally and I would take that table out of the running.

Now be careful. Just because you see a fish – or two – or three at a table doesn’t mean it’s worth sitting at. If these guys have real short stacks you might want to just move on and find the next one. Why? Because I find that by the time I actually get at the table (assuming I have to get on the wait list), I will more then likely be replacing one of these fish from his seat. And two there are plenty of other players like me that are like vultures monitoring the tables and they will spot this juicy table too and many times I find myself 20 minutes later sitting at a table full of predators because we quickly sat down and busted the fish. To me sometimes it’s just not worth it.

So that’s my general algorithm for table selection. But not having these statistics available to me has really hampered my ability to find good tables on PokerStars. Generally I sit down and it takes me at least 30 minutes to even figure out if I have a good table or a bad table. The good news is as I play more, I get more and more statistics on the players around me and this problem should slowly lessen.

Back in the grind