Using Pokertracker is like bringing a pen and paper to a live game and writing down every single detail that takes place. Imagine how much the old pro's would have valued this kind of information!
Playing online means that you can have all this information and use it to play better poker. Every hand of online poker you play is recorded as a hand history. Pokertracker takes all your hand histories and turns it into an extensive database and represents the information through useful statistics.
PokerAce is a complimentary tool for Pokertracker that takes Pokertracker data and places it on the actual table. So if you've played 150 hands against a guy who just joined your table, you are shown the stats for that player based on those 150 hands. This gives you a strong advantage as you can imagine.
While Pokertracker can show a wide range of information, I am just going to list the three main types to illustrate how important using Pokertracker is.
VPIP%
This stands for Voluntarily put into pot. Blinds are a forced bet...anything else you wager is voluntary. So VPIP represents how often players are putting money into the pot rather than folding. The higher a players VPIP, the looser they are. If their VPIP is quite high, you know them to be a bad, loose calling station. This means you want to get in more pots with this player, and make them pay for their draws because they are more likely to call you down. At the same time, if a player has a low VPIP you know them to be tight. So you have a better chance of stealing their blinds, while you know to be extra cautious when they are giving you action.
PFR%
This stands for Preflop Raise %. It represents how often a player raises preflop. If a player has a high PFR, their range of hands that they would raise with is bigger, meaning that you can give them less credit for premium hands when they do raise. As an example, if you are on the big blind with AQ and a guy who has a PFR of 20% bets into you, you can be confident you have the better hand. Whereas if he has a PFR of 4%, he is likely to have a strong hand because he raises so seldomly. In this way you can make good decisions on how to play your hands.
Aggression Factor
This is fairly self explanatory. It measures how aggressive a player is. The more aggressive the player is, the more they are going to be betting and raising draws, or placing continuation bets. An aggressive player is more likely to use position against you, whereas a passive player will not be so quick to put you on the spot. Aggressive players can be given less credibility for made hands when betting than a passive player.
We give away 2 copies of Pokertracker every week in our weekly Tuesday games. Pokerace is available
here