Why analyze your data?
Welcome to this Poker Spin Tracker course. Let's start simple: three concrete reasons to use a tracker.
Gandalf
Co-founder of Poker Sciences
One thing is certain in Spins: all good players use a tracker. It's a common trait among regulars, without exception.
The reason is simple: without organized data, you're playing blind. And playing blind, as you might guess, isn't optimal.
With a tracker, a serious player gets access to information that would be impossible to access without one, and that's a decisive advantage.
There are 3 main reasons to use a tracker. Let's look at them, from the most intuitive to the most technical.
1. Analyze your "meta"
By "meta", we mean everything that does not directly concern the analysis of your game (that will be the next part), but everything around it.
If that feels a bit fuzzy, here are a few examples to make it clearer. People generally download a tracker to get all of this "meta" data:
- How many tournaments did I play this month?
- What's my actual profit?
- At which buy-in am I most profitable?
- How much do I earn per hour?
Without a tracker, these questions have no reliable answers. With one, you get access to all of these metrics: profit, bankroll, earnings by position, earnings per hour, time played, rakeback... Everything is there, session after session.
Each tracker chooses which metrics to implement, and especially which ones it builds by default.
Poker Spin Tracker being specialized in Spins, every important metric for Spin players is directly available, with no complex setup required.
When analyzing your "meta", it is important to go beyond raw numbers. We must indeed distinguish results (what happened) from performance (how you played). Understanding this distinction means understanding that luck and skill aren't measured the same way.
It's one of the most important lessons a tracker teaches.
You can lose money over a period while having played very well, and vice versa.
That's the harsh law of poker, but it's also why you still have fish at your tables: if they lost all the time, they wouldn't be there.
But ultimately, the final metric that matters in Spins is $/h.
All other data serves, directly or indirectly, to optimize it.
2. Analyze your game
Knowing where you stand is good. Knowing how to improve is even better. That's the second reason to use a tracker: identifying your leaks.
A leak is a mistake you repeat regularly without necessarily realizing it. And this is where the brain tricks us: it remembers spectacular bad beats and ignores the small, mundane hands.
Yet it's often those hands, repeated hundreds of times, that cost the most. A small leak, repeated over 5,000 Spins, can add up to a considerable amount.
How do you find them?
By comparing your actions against reference actions.
Of course, we'll go into this in much more detail in the next chapters, but for now just remember that this can, for example, mean comparing your preflop play to ranges, comparing your play vs fish to fish-specific ranges, analyzing your postflop actions against those of strong players, etc.
Many players find this step intimidating, because mainstream trackers (PT4, Hand2Note) don't do much to make it easy. They're built for MTTs and Cash Games, not for Spins.
Note 1: Bars can be wide because within the same field (for example "Analyze your meta"), some data can be very easy to find while other data can be very difficult to obtain.
Note 2: For Poker Spin Tracker and Hand2Note, you can see small bars separated from the rest under "Inaccessible". This means that with these two trackers, some data is impossible to obtain. But rest assured, for Poker Spin Tracker, for example, these are pieces of information that are of very little use in Spins (for example "% BB call vs BTN open 4x").
3. Analyze your opponents' game
Once you know your own results and your leaks, the next question comes naturally:
How do your opponents play?
Poker Spin Tracker classifies every opponent you encounter into two profiles: Fish (recreational) and Regs (regulars). And these two profiles play very differently.
Against a reg, the play is close to GTO solver theory. You don't necessarily need a tracker to anticipate how a reg will play.
Against a fish however, everything changes: sizings differ, frequencies are unusual, ranges are heavily unbalanced, atypical plays.
It's especially against fish that data becomes valuable.
When a fish opens 3x, what's their range? When they donk bet, what does it mean? How often do they fold to a 3-bet? The tracker aggregates thousands of hands to answer these questions.
I often hear:
My field is very aggressive, how do I adapt?
To which I always want to answer:
I don't believe you, because the field isn't that aggressive. Show me why you're saying this.
But analyzing opponents doesn't stop at observation. You need to move on to building strategies, which can be complex.
But we will look at that later, we will have plenty of time for it...
