This is an old article about table selection software, and while Pokertracker and Holdem Manager today both have built in table selection features, the article is still relevant.
When you play poker you win money from bad players. The bigger the difference in skill between you and another player, the more money you will (theoretically) win from him.
This means that if you look at all the tables available to play at, you will win significantly more money if you can find the ones with the worst players. Finding the most profitable tables and rejecting the “bad” ones are called table selection.
This article will show you how to find the tables with the worst players, and as a result win more money.
Download your free trial of SpadeIT’s table selection software
I recommend that you read these articles about poker datamining and how to buy hand histories before you read the rest of the article.
Traditional Table Selection
The traditional way to table select is to to look at a poker room’s lobby and join the waiting list of the tables that has the highest average pot size and average players/flop percentage and join those tables.
Another common method is to play 20-30 hands at a table, and then decide whether or not you think you would be better off if you leave the table and open a new one.
Unfortunately both these methods only give you a vague idea about how bad the players at the table are, and you are forced to sit down and play for a bit before you are able to accurately determine how big your advantage on the table are.
Modern Table Selection – Table Selection Software
The traditional methods for table selection isn’t by any means bad. Doing things manually are vastly superior to just joining the first tables in the lobby without any critical judgment.
Table selection software is an extra thing, that will give your winrate that extra little nudge upwards that will make it truely extraordinary.
In the rest of the article I will focus on SpadeIT’s table selection software, since that is what I use myself and recommend to the players I coach. The most popular of SpadeIT’s products are SpadeEye, which are their table selection tool for Party Poker, Full Tilt Poker and the Cereus network.
Download a free trial of SpadeIT’s table selection software
SpadeEye and other SpadeIT products
Screenshot of EyePoker (SpadeEye for iPoker) – It is much easier to use than it looks.
SpadeEye and the other table selection programs work, by scanning the lobby of the pokerroom and collecting the name of every single player who are currently sitting at a table. The player names are then cross referenced with you Pokertracker (or Holdem Manager) database, and SpadeEye retrieves the stats for all the players that you have in your database.
The stats are then used to analyze the tables, and you are then presented with a list of tables, where you can easily see where the bad players are sitting, and you can then join those tables.
If you haven’t used table selection software before, I urge you to at try it out – SpadeIT offer a free 8 day trial of all their programs. That way you can see if it is for you, without risking any money.
All you have to do to start your trial, is to download the software you want to try out – No registration is required.
Download your free trial of SpadeIT’s table selection software
Table Selection and Datamining
If you want to reap the full benefits of programs like SpadeEye, you should combine the use of SpadeEye (or any other table selection tool) with datamined hand histories – You can get those by using a handgrabber, or simply buy the hand histories.
That way you can easily get stats on more than 90% of the players on a pokerroom. And when you give SpadeEye that much information on the players, it can give you nearly perfect information on every single table table on the pokerroom.
EyePoker after scanning the lobby – Note that 89,5% of all the players that the tables are known.
Before you start datamining or buy any hand histories, you should check if you are allowed to do so – Some pokerrooms consider datamining to be an unfair advantage..
I haven’t heard of anybody getting in more trouble because of datamining than getting an email asking them to stop, however, I strongly advice you to read the rules of the pokerroom carefully before you do any datamining, and if it is prohibited please respect the rules of the pokerroom.
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