A good site to bookmark if you play a lot of cash games is PokerTableRatings.com. This site mines hand histories from all the large poker sites like PokerStars.com and Full Tilt Poker. On PokerTableRatings.com (I’ll abbreviate it PTR for the remainder of this post) you can search to find key information about your opponents.
It gives them an overall score between 0 and 100, and it offers various other scores, like how likely they are to go on tilt, as well as a “bot score” (whether they play hands the same way every time, or are capable of changing gears). You can check to see what starting hands a player plays particularly well, or particularly badly.
You can also get an opponent’s play graded, based on a comparison to the best players at a particular level. For example, if a player receives an F for pre-flop tightness at the .50/$1 level because he is way more loose than the average player, then you can expect him to play a lot of trash like Q4 offsuit and have less to fear when he enters pots. On the other hand, if a player receives a bad grade for being TOO tight, you better watch out when he’s in a pot, because he probably has something like a big pocket pair or AKs/AQs.
It also grades aggression on every street. If you see that a player with a D for being too aggressive on the flop, for example, he probably c-bets and check-raise bluffs too often.
It can be useful to get an idea of who’s who at the table before you play. One thing I like to do is get on a wait list about 3 deep for a 9-seat cash game, and then while I’m waiting to get my seat I use PTR to do research on the other players.
One warning, though – PTR grades players based on ALL play at a particular level. So, for example, when it grades me on .50/$1 cash games, it’s not really an accurate reflection of how I would play today. The last time I played at that level was summer 2009, when I was too passive and had poor starting hand selection.
For up-to-date stats on players, PTR sells hand histories. You can import these into software like PokerTracker that overlays the table display, and then you can see key stats on each player – how often they put money in pots pre-flop, how often they raise pre-flop, how often they c-bet, how often they fold to a c-bet, that kind of thing. Information is power. In online games, you rarely know the people sitting at the table, so buying these hand histories is a way to know them better than they know you.
In the next post I’ll discuss another way to use PTR to improve your profitability at cash games.