Stacking, Tiling, and Rating

Not a lot to to report, but it's Sunday morning and I'm up early with little to do for the next hour or so. I played off and on yesterday, getting in a thousand hands of Rush. I basically broke even for the day. I was up in the $10NL FR games, but down in the $25NL games. There weren't any particularly interesting hands to describe here, but I did experiment with "stacking" Rush tables while I played.

Normally when I play Rush, I "tile" the tables on my screen, so that I can see all four tables at once. Then I simply scan in a clockwise fashion from table to table., acting whenever it's appropriate to do so. Playing this way allows me to get into a rythym, plus I can keep track of action on each table after I have acted.

In contrast, "stacking" puts each table right on top of each other. When the action is to me, the active table pops up to the top of the stack requiring me to bet, check or fold. Then, after acting and when another table requires me to act, the new table pops up onto the top and waits for me to bet, check or fold.

The advantage of stacking is that it allows me to have much bigger table sizes (i.e., full screen size), which in turn allows easier reading of my PT3 HUD stats during play. The downside (which is also an advantage, as I'll describe in a minute) is that once you act at a table, it disapears behind the next active table. Say that you've got aces and there's a lot of raising and re-raising preflop. You end up getting all the money into the middle PF.....but then the table disapears from view and you don't know if you won or lost the hand. It's just gone until the next hand is dealt and it's your turn to act again.

This can be mentally very frustrating, but I think it's actually a good thing overall. One of the fundamental tenets of perfect poker is the notion that the outcome of a particular hand is irrelevant; what matters is whether you played the hand correctly or not. Did you get your money in with the best of it? If so, you did your job, period. For example, playing aces correctly means trying to get all the money into the middle PF. If you manage to do this, then the outcome will take care of itself over time in the long run. Whether you won this one particular hand or not simply doesn't matter in the big picture.

I'm going to continue experimenting with stacking tables over the course of the next week or so and see if it's for me or not. Like I said, it can be frustrating, plus it doesn't allow you to see how long the opp is taking to make a decision, read any of their chat messages (e.g., to see if they're tilting), etc. On the other hand, it really does make you focus on playing hands correctly.

[UPDATE] About an hour after posting the above about Stacking, I tried it with Omaha for a quick 100 hands. Wow, what a difference. I opened 3 tables of Rush Omaha $10PL, and played for fifteen minutes. Stacking really allowed (forced?) me to concentrate on each hand individually and, presumably, make the best decision possible. I folded in a couple of spots that I probably would have played if I'd had even just two tables open in Tile mode. Dunno why this is so, but playing with only one table open in front of me at a time (at least in Omaha) *feels* much better. (Or maybe I'm just happy I posted a $12 gain for the session, and I'm focusing on results. Hmmmm.) In any case, the (Im)Perfect Omaha experiment has a new wrinkle for the remainder of the month, me thinks....

Another thing to note is that I was able (barely) to play three tables at once of Omaha when stacking. When I'm tiling, I find that I can (barely) play two. Again, it's a focus thing. With just one table "open" at a time, you really can't think about the other two tables in the background.

Finally, on a separate topic I've begun experimenting with the "auto rate" function in PT3. Auto rate goes through you data and assigns a player type (and associated icon) to players whose stats fit various criteria. There are fish, rocks, calling stations, etc. that it creates based on VPIP, PFR, etc. You can customize this, too, with user-defined stats and icons. The cool (but, ultimately, maybe useless?) thing is that you can then have HUD display the icon for the player on the table. The general idea is that you can quickly see if someone is, say, a calling station without looking at actual numbers, and make decisions based on simple icons. When massive multi-tabling, this might be a reasonable way to play when you don't have a lot of time to digest stats. I'd like to see how useful these icons are when compared to the traditional stats that HUD displays. [END UPDATE]

All-in for now...
-Bug