I have always felt that limit Texas Hold’em poker is a form of poker that demands the use of tracker software more than any other. With the game stretching ever nearer to becoming a solved game then the need to use data from poker trackers is pretty self evident.

I use Poker Office and have done for some considerable time but to highlight just what I mean here I am going to take an example from $10-$20 six handed limit hold’em to highlight what I mean.

In the first situation you are on the button with an A-Q and the hijack raises to $20 and the cut-off re-raises to $30. Now the default play here would be to cap the betting but if you have Poker Office data to go on then you can maybe reach a more accurate decision. In this instance then the first raiser has key stats of 22/14/1.5 while the three bettor has statistics of 21/13/1.6.

The first metric is VPIP which stands for Voluntary Puts Money into the Pot, the second metric is the percentage of times that a player raises with the final figure being an aggression factor. Now it is not the point of this article to delve into these statistics and what they mean. But to cut to the crux of the matter, the statistics of both of these players indicate one thing.

This is that both of them are players that can only be defined as rocks in this form of poker. So when a rock raises and another rock re-raises then an A-Q isn’t all that good even in six handed poker. You now have a hand that is marginal and while capping is still not a bad poker play here, I would be looking to balance my play with making some folds here at least some of the time.

I definitely think that an A-J even if suited can be folded here in this situation against players with these metrics. You could choose to reduce variance here by simply folding the A-Q against two rocks as the likelihood is that you could be dominated by an A-K or possibly tying with the other A-Q. You could even be dominated by AA,KK or QQ here as well.

But this is just one situation where having the proper data could save you a ton of bets. If you want to cap this to create an image or to give action then fair enough but I still don’t think that this is called for in this instance. Now if you change this situation to one where you have two maniacs who are raising and re-raising then you can cap the betting with impunity.

Here then the default play of capping does pretty well. In higher limit play then strong players will three bet maniacs quite liberally so your hand is probably best in this instance. When compounded over the space of a year and tens of thousands of hands then it isn’t difficult to imagine just how important tracker devices like Poker Office and other types of online poker software really are.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson