Adventures with Two Million Hands from HandHQ

Recently, I did some research for a student who wanted to start seriously grinding Fixed-Limit Hold'em. He had most of the necessary poker skills after playing in brick and mortar casinos, but he wasn't terribly familiar with the online game. I thought the process of getting a brick and mortar player to understand the differences and the extra tools he'll need to be a serious online poker player would be useful to readers of PokerSoftware.com.

The first thing I did was give him a list of software to download. This included Hold'em Manager, StoxEV, PokerStove, and a number of AutoHotKey scripts. We will work with these programs over the next few weeks to determine correct basic strategies in the games he'll be playing, but in order to do that, we'll need to know exactly what the games are like. To be able to get a feel for exactly what the games are like and how the best players are managing to beat them, we purchased two million hands from HandHQ.
 
All of this software was a big surprise for the player, who had heard about PokerTracker for years, but really had no idea how much information you could have on an opponent. With two million hands, we could load them in to Hold'em Manager and then run reports that would have been impossible a year or two ago. It took a few hours to load the hand histories into the database in Hold'em Manager, but once we got that done, we started by running a report where we looked for players who had at least 50,000 hands in our database and then sorted them by big bets per 100 hands.

I was hoping that we could find some real quantifiable information about how winning players were playing in comparison to the losing ones. We had many players in our database that were over 100,000 hands, but we learned that there were players with nearly the exact same stats as the biggest winners, but instead were huge losers.

We were able to find out how the games typically played out, but it was not a lot of information that I didn't already know in terms of how to beat these games. What the lack of information in the stats told us was that most players in these games know the basics and are playing pretty well pre-flop and making most of the correct plays. Since the difference between winners and losers was tough to quantify, that tells me that actual poker skills are what most of the losers lack.

Since my student had already been beating Fixed-Limit Hold'em games for years in casinos, the ability to play after the flop and know which medium strength hands should be folded and which should be shown down are not a problem for him.

Our biggest lesson was that as the games get tougher, we can't just rely on stats and "solid play" in order to win. We saw players with remarkably similar stats losing five big bets per 100 hands or winning two big bets per 100 hands over samples of over 100,000 hands. When we found these players and watched a few of them play, the difference was clearly in the hands they went to the end with.

So while we may preach poker software here, and without it the games we were looking at would be tough to beat, the lesson we ultimately learned was that intangibles are what separates grinders who just scrape by from big winners who can make real money playing this game.

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