Your Personal Pool Stats

Your Personal Pool Stats 

If you play in a league, I am sure you know your win/lose record. You may even know your record against players of a specific rank. And you have someone keeping track of your innings on the team scorecard. But do you know how many innings you average per game, per match, per month?
 
For example, if you play in the Philadelphia APA and your 8 ball rank is 6 and you win matches verses players ranked 4 and 5, you may play for a very long time before you see a change in your rank. At the same time, you may be averaging one fewer inning per game or as many as 6 fewer innings per match better than this time last year. And if you are a top ranked player, you may never see improvement on your part reflected in your ranking. You might even show a different ranking and win lose record if you were playing in a different region, like Norristown. You would be playing different players on different tables, under different conditions.
   
How do you know if you are getting better as you put in all of this playing time and practice time? You may not be improving at all but declining in skill. Some highly ranked players might decline in ability as a result of playing lower ranked players from one week to the next. The higher ranked player may also practice less because he does not need to put in as much work to post wins from week to week.

Another problem is that the higher you are ranked, the more subtle your improvement or decline. As an example, let’s say Player ONE can run 5 racks of balls in 85 shots (75 would be perfect), but it takes Player TWO 125 shots to run the same 75 balls. After 6 months of practice, it is much easier for player TWO to get down to 115 than it is for Player ONE to get down to 75.  (A ten shot improvement for each player.)

Outside of knowing if your overall performance is improving, wouldn’t you like to know about specific areas of your game? As an example, what is your break percentage today verses a year ago? Do you have more wins on bar boxes or on larger tables? Do you play better on Tuesdays verses Mondays? This last one might seem a little bit of a stretch, but at times players play better on specific days of the week because of other activities. For example, someone who works out on Monday mornings might play better on Tuesday night verses Monday night.

What about that low-deflection cue you just bought, or that new break cue you bought recently. Do you play better with this new equipment? Maybe you only think you play better with it. Maybe you play much better and do not know just how much improvement you can attribute to having good equipment. Serious players who keep good stats can tell you for a fact that they play better with certain types of cues because they have hundreds of hours of stats showing before and after performance numbers.

I would be surprised if every pro could not tell you if he or she shoots better with a low deflection shaft or what the ideal weight for a break cue is for them. It will take some large trial numbers to get accurate comparisons in some areas of your game, but you will not have anything to work with down the road if you do not start now. You may not want to measure the same things that another player might, but here is a list of a few things you may want to consider.

1)      What is your likelihood of making a ball on the break in 8-ball and 9-ball?

2)      How often do you scratch on the break?

3)      Do you have a better win percentage during low inning games or high inning games?

4)      How many shots does it take you to run 5 racks of balls?

5)      What is your average number of innings played (minus defensive shots) in 8-ball or 9-ball

 

Find your own system and items you would like to measure, but I find numbers 1 and 4 very useful. In fact, I do what I call a Rack and Run test every day of the week. This would be number 4 on the list above. Note: I count scratches as two shots and spot a ball if I scratch. Any ball made unintentionally after the break gets spotted, and I also count breaks as one shot. 75 points is a perfect score.

If you have questions or comments, you can email me at Bryan@NWQPool.com. Follow me on Twitter @PhillyPoolShark

Poker Bluff Overkill

If you are playing on line or in live Casino games, chances are, you run up against three kinds of players:
1)  Donkeys (really bad players)
2) Intermediates (average guys and girls, who know a little, but most likely never read a poker book)
3) Skilled players.

We are going to make an assumption about your game, and say that you fall into the middle area. I know you think you play better than average, but the fact that you "don't know what you don't know," is why professionals can make a living off of average players.

You think you know what to do in a loose game,  when you flop a set into a coordinated board; but you don't know. Because if you have an answer to this puzzle, you don't know enough to realize that it all depends on many other factors. So given that you got that pop quiz wrong, lets assume you are average.

Because you are reading this, you have a desire to work on your game, and may have read a book or two. So you know a few tricks. You have a basic understanding of when to bet, when to bluff, and maybe when to slow-play a big hand.But what your game might be missing is, when you should make the big moves and against who should you make them.

You as an Intermediate player, might be able to get off of (fold) Ace/Ace, when there is a three flush on board after the turn. And a Skilled player, might have already gotten off the hand or he has bet enough that the other players never got to see the turn. But the Donkeys are not going to fold this hand, even if you put a gun in their mouths and told them to muck their cards.

So even though this (three flush on the turn board), might be a good board to bluff at, when you have nothing at all, in a two or three way hand, your bluff here is going to be useless verses the bad player.. Donkeys do not fold big pairs. So why are you betting into a player who is not smart enough to know he should fold?

The worse your opponents are, the more often you will need a "real" hand to take down the pot. Save your advanced moves for your advanced competition. Save your big "all-in" bluffs, for the top players. They are more likely to fold. (Assuming they do not read your bet as a bluff.)

An example hand would be, an unpaired board, with a three flush (spades) on the river. You are sure your opponent made a flush, but you hold the Ace of spades. Note that he DOES NOT have the nuts, and since you played this hand to the river, you could very well have a flush. But all you have is
pair, or maybe nothing but Ace-High. We will also assume that you have a tight aggressive image at the table.

Against a top player, you could push here and win the pot. He knows that you could have been on a draw, and that you could have a better flush then he does. Therefore, he is most likely going to fold this hand even if he has a set. (Three of a kind.) This is also assuming that your bet is large enough relative to the size of the pot. The Donkey is going to call, because he has a flush, and is not smart enough to fall for your lie. Its like lying to your wife in Chinese. How is she going to buy it if she cant understand what you are saying. The Donkey does not understand that you are saying, "I have a flush you stupid-ass, so fold!"

The bottom line is: Don't play (bluff) over the head of the person you are trying to trick. And don't tell your wife lies in Chinese, unless she speaks Chinese.

On Line Poker in Delaware

Delaware has had on line gambling (poker is all you should care about unless you are a sucker.) for about three months now. Being a small state, there was some question about the number of people who would participate, and if it would be a success. I would even bet that many people in the state do not even know that the games exist.

For this blog, I will remove any business side measurements of success, and focus on success for players. Keeping in mind that the sites have been up for less than three months, here is what we have so far:

- The gaming platform is outstanding. Someone who has great levels of expertise as well as experience playing in on-line games, has obviously had a hand in the development. (As should be expected.)

- The process for getting an account open can be an issue. First, if you do not live in Delaware, forget about it. Even remote access is impossible. If you run windows 7 or 8, you will need to make minor adjustments in order to get into the site to play. Support can help you  with that.

- The deposit and withdraw process is good. You can have cash sent directly from a checking account and this takes just minutes to set up. You can even set daily deposit limits on yourself.

- The games that are offered are numerous, but there just are not enough players to keep them going. There are never any higher limit cash or Sit and Go games. The limit and no-limit cash games are "soft" (full of weak players who are clueless but don't know that they are clueless), but the limits are too low to take advantage of them.

Right now, it's the only legal Internet poker in town for Delawareans. But real players will still want to hit the off-shore sites for any real games and levels. I recommend that "real Internet grinders," put in some time on the Delaware site, if for no other reason that to help spark it's growth for your future business.