Not happy with Poker Tracker

I'm still in the free trial period for Poker Tracker 3, and I'm sure glad they offer one, because I'm not feeling inclined to buy it, and if I had paid for it, I would be getting even more irritated with the product than I am now.

It's buggy. At least three times the HUD has vanished for no apparent reason in the middle of a game (or two or three), and the software won't respond to any commands. I have had to resort to the Task Manager to force it to shut down, then restart.

It also occasionally does weird things such as shown above. I was doing two SNGs at a time, as I commonly do. It seemed to be working normally, but then the HUD blinked off on the game on the right. It took me several minutes to notice that the HUD on the game on the left had changed in a rather important way at the same time: It was now showing me stats for the seats on the right-hand game! If you look closely, you can see that the names in the HUD match the corresponding seats in the other game. If I had changed the display to omit the players' names in order to save screen space, as one commenter suggested when I first installed the program, I would never have noticed this, and would have been relying on completely false numbers. That is completely unacceptable. Erroneous data is far worse than no data at all.

And it does compile erroneous data. In one game, I raised the very first hand with K-K and won, but for another 20 hands or so, until I raised pre-flop for the second time, it continued to show my pre-flop raising percentage for that table as zero. Yes, Tracker had been on and set to import hands well before the SNG started. That makes me wonder what else it's missing or getting wrong that I haven't noticed.

The HUD blinks off for several seconds when it's updating. Annoyingly, this is often right when I need it most, when somebody has put in a raise and I want to evaluate how much weight to give it. BOOM--HUD is off for five seconds or so, and I don't know how long until it will be back. Extremely irritating.

I had heard that one needed to do periodic maintenance on the database in order to keep it from getting bogged down. I went to the web site for "how-to" instructions on this. The options for how to do this maintenance were baffling. I'd like to think that I'm a pretty smart guy, and I definitely have more education than any decent person needs. But I could not make heads or tails of what this section of the FAQ was trying to tell me to do, nor why.

Similarly, I had noticed a feature about marking hands for later review. Great. I figured out how to mark one during a game. But then I wanted to find it to, y'know, do the "later review" part. Checked all the menu options and tabs I could find--nothing. Went to the web site, finally tracked down a couple of places where people were talking about this feature in the forums. Apparently I am not the only one to be confounded by how to employ this feature, because there was more than one question about "where are the marked hands?" But even when I tried to follow the instructions provided, I couldn't. I simply could not find the sequence of steps/options they were trying to get me to follow. Again I emphasize that I'm not a generally dense or helpless person. I can nearly always get computers to do whatever I need them to do, and I can follow directions as well as the next guy. If I can't figure out how to do something that should be incredibly simple--like find a hand marked for later review--even after I've read your instructions, then the software is badly designed, the instructions are poorly written, or both.

My final gripe is that the HUD doesn't do one of its most basic tasks consistently, at least on Bodog. If there is a bet and call on the river, the little "after-image" display will show only the hand(s) that Bodog showed itself. If the loser mucks without showing, the HUD will not display those cards, even though I can retrieve that information by going into Bodog's "last hand" history. In other words, the data is there, but not displayed. The ability to skip the time-consuming and distracting step of opening the last-hand history page was one of the chief reasons I wanted a HUD in the first place, and the damn software won't do it consistently.

I know that this is a very powerful analytic tool. Maybe I have something set wrong. But good software design makes at least the most basic and commonly used features easy to find and use. With good design, a user should be able to ask himself, "What would be the easiest or most obvious way to make X happen?" and then find that, lo and behold, that is exactly what works. Tracker has not even a trace of such thoughtful design. Most likely there are solutions to all of my problems, were I to invest enough time to learn the ins and outs, and navigate the thicket of bewildering menu options. But I don't want to. I want to play poker, I don't want to play Poker Tracker. It's supposed to be a tool that helps me, not something that requires more attention than the game itself. Tracker may be like the power of a snarling Lamborghini, but I really want something as simple and reliable as a Toyota Camry. I'd happily forego a complex feature set for ease of use and dependability.

The bottom line: In addition to being buggy and unreliable, the program is complex, obtuse, opaque, and mysterious even when it's working the way it's supposed to.

It's time to download Hold'Em Manager for its trial period and see if it's any better suited to my needs and expectations.

The very picture of passivity

It's not hard to get a general feel for how a table plays. But once in a while, I'm finding that the numbers in Poker Tracker's heads-up display emphasizes some feature of the players more concretely and definitively than my unaided subjective sense conveys.

Above is a great example. I was aware that this table was playing more passively than most. But then I stopped and looked around the table at the numbers, and was floored by just how insanely passive it revealed the action to be.

Look at it. We've got "sallil" playing 46% of his hands, but raising only 4%. We've got "g ma" playing 45% of his hands, but raising only 3%. We've got "WhoUgunaCall" playing 25% of his hands, raising zero. We've got "player1901" playing 42% of his hands, raising zero. Finally, and most extremely, we've got "J5892" playing 54% of his hands, raising zero. Their aggression factors reveal that only one of them bet or raised post-flop more than he checked or called, and only two of them did so more than a third of the time.

(Me? Completely card dead. On the rare occasions that I got a decent starting hand and raised, I got a bunch of callers and then totally whiffed the flop, and was unwilling to bluff into a field full of calling stations.)

It's impossible to play this way profitably in the long run. I wonder how long it will take this bunch to figure that out. We can hope that they never do.

First pay-off for Poker Tracker

As I've mentioned, I'm experimenting with Poker Tracker. I have done nothing with the data it is accumulating. For now, I'm just getting used to the heads-up display (HUD), getting a feel for the range of normal for the various stats shown, learning to make mental correlations between those numbers and what I can expect from the players they're attached to.

Today was the first time that I made a crucial decision differently than I otherwise might have because of the HUD. Six players left in a SNG, I had 11 big blinds remaining and was in the small blind with suited K-10. Player to my right raised to 3x after everybody folded to him. It could easily be just a blind steal. It's a spot in which I have to think about shoving. I play tightly enough that I tend to get a lot of respect when I raise or reraise, and this would have been my first all-in of the game, which should command even more fold equity.

I was thinking about what to do, when it occurred to me to check the raiser's stats. I had three games running, which is the maximum that I can manage so far, and one of them was tricky and demanding most of my attention, so the other two (including the one in which this story occurred) were sort of on autopilot. For that reason, I didn't have a good sense of what the raiser's tendencies were from having observed him.

But the HUD told the story. His VPIP (voluntarily put money into pot) was 7%, and his pre-flop raise was 2%, over the course of 48 hands. Whoa! This is not just tight, this is Rocky McRockerson. Sirens started going off in my brain, and I clicked the "fold" button as quickly as the implication of those numbers registered with me.

The big blind either didn't have a HUD or decided to ignore it. He shoved with something like Q-J, and got insta-called by Rocky with his A-K, and exited the game when the board improved neither of them (and would not have helped me, either).

I ended up rallying and coming in second. (I would have won, but when our stacks were nearly even, we got it all in pre-flop with my A-Ko versus his K-Qo, and he caught a four-flush to win, leaving me with 2 big blinds, and I couldn't recover. Grrrrr.) That's $15 I likely would have lost had I shoved in the earlier spot.

Score one for Poker Tracker.