Monday, October 5, 2009

Data mining on Full Tilt & PokerStars from Gugel!

Let me start by saying - I'm a big Gugel fanboy. He has only further enhanced his reputation with the following:

During the past 2-3 weeks, Gugel over at AnskyPoker.com has gathered statistics (which I view as critical to play) on the two main sites, Full Tilt & PokerStars.

He started with an estimation of difficulty in moving up in stakes, where he looked at how many hands are played by a player, ultimately getting to a heads up situation. The end result heads up situation yields the difficulty of the level. I'm not convinced this is the optimal way of looking at it - check out the post for details - but it certainly is better than anything else out there that I'm aware of...

Next, he took a look at average pot sizes between PokerStars & Tilt to determine which is a "looser" site. I believe this is a good way of viewing the difficulty of each site, because the more money / pot, ideally the more players / flop. I don't know whether the data was available, but it would seem a combination of plrs / flop + money / pot would be a more accurate depiction, but certainly, money / pot seems like a very good way as an isolated variable. What I would like to see is a view of each game (i.e. HU, 6 max & full ring NL/PL HE). Whether he's able to extract that data, I don't know - but this is certainly unique data.

Finally, he recently posted data on the best time of day to play. The results were somewhat surprising; the times to play were skewed towards east coast prime time. I would have expected to see European prime time hours (approx. 2:00PM-5:00PM EST), but the data does not seem to support that theory. Anyway, if you are serious about your poker, as I am, go check out his posts... Definitely quick and refreshing reads - in addition, check out the rest of his site; very interesting stuff in there...

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