The one tip that helped me increase my winrate…
One of the most effective poker analytics I ever performed with my poker tracking software seems very obvious now, but it wasn’t so obvious before it occurred to me.
I imported all hands I had ever played into a poker tracker database (that resulted in a massive 2million+ hand database) and I looked at my win rate for each day of the week. Obviously, the weekends were very profitable. Fridays and Saturdays mostly so as one would expected – this is when the drunk fish come online.
My least profitable days were Wednesday and Thursday. I was breakeven/slightly losing on these two days over my entire poker career. Think about that for a second – every time that I played on these days I was expected to breakeven or lose! What a waste of my time. I might as well have been sitting on the couch watching TV (this didn’t include rakeback but nobody should be playing just for rakeback).
Another surprise was that Monday was similarly profitable to Friday and Saturday (I still can’t understand why it is but I had noticed that the games always seem to be good on a Monday evening). Tuesday was slightly profitable but less than Monday.
Taking this information into account, I completely banned myself from playing on Wednesday and Thursday. These are the days when I study and review hands when I get time or go do real life stuff. I also started playing more on Mondays as this was such a profitable day. This was just at the start of 2015 which turned out to be my most profitable year (win rate was increased by more than 50% than the year previous) and I attribute changing my play structure to a decent proportion of this.
To emphasis this let’s take a quick example: We are a 3.5bb/100 winner and on average we play 10k hands a week with an average of 2k hands on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and 1k on each of the other days of the week. Our win rate distribution may look like:
Monday: 4bb/100
Tuesday: 1bb/100
Wednesday: -0.5bb/100
Thursday: -1bb/100
Friday: 5bb/100
Saturday 6bb/100
Sunday 4.5bb/100
It seems clear and obvious what to do when looking at in black and white. But most players never look at anything like this – they just jump on the tables and hope profits come their way. So if we stop playing on Wednesday and Thursday, and play less frequently on Tuesday (500 hands average). Thus we play 3k hands on Saturday and Sunday and 2.5k on Friday. With that distribution we go from a 3.5bb/100 winner to almost a 5bb/100 winner.
Now there are a few assumptions in the analysis but you get the idea. 1.5b/100 difference is massive considering that the games are becoming so competitive. What I would recommend is that you go do a similar process yourself (look at all the hands you have ever played by day and see if trends emerge) and see can you find something similar. Even if you only manage to find 0.5bb/100 that will add up to a huge amount throughout the year.
If you don’t have all your hands at your disposal to do this analysis, do the analysis with what you have taking into account the less reliable smaller samples sizes. Overall, try to play less during midweek and more at the weekend – this will greatly improve your bottom line.