Stealing Stats.... or "Dunno" is my answer for the day

Attended a group poker session at Poker Moses' house today at lunch, where I spent 30 minutes playing two simultaneous tables of $10NL FR Rush in front of the group, and then twenty minutes post-mortem'ing a couple of the key hands with the other players. This is a good format for me as it helps me think more deeply about specific situations and hands. It is also useful to listen to other good players' thoughts and strategies. Good stuff overall, but, in all honesty, I still don't quite feel like I'm playing "my game" when I'm in a group setting like that. Now, don't get me wrong, I think it's good for me overall, but I'm still a little "off" whenever I play in that setting. The thing I need to do to fix this is, obviously, play more in that format and just plain get more seat time in front of an audience.

Anyway, something that got mentioned by Flyboy at the session was stealing, and whether it was actually profitable or not to steal at the rate I was doing it. Said another way: I ran at something like 60% ATS during the 200 hands I played, and I showed a loss of a couple of bucks for those steal attempts overall. Ergo, the question arises: was I stealing too much? And if so, what is a more reasonable target rate for Attempt To Steal?

The short answer is: yes, I was probably stealing a tad too much, but over 200 hands it's hard to really say anything more definitive than that. Sixty percent is probably too high in general, but maybe it was called for in this instance, maybe not. Maybe I got unlucky, or maybe I got what I deserved. Dunno. Two hundred hands is essentially a meaningless sample size.

Sooooo.... to help understand this a little better, I went back and looked at the PT3 stats I have for Rush $10 and $25NL hands that I have stored on this particular computer. The total number of hands I have saved is roughly 18,700. From those 18.7K hands, I posted a net profit of $525, which equates to 7.2 ptbb/100, or about $2.80 per 100 hands played. Looking at the graph of my results vs. All-in EV shows that I was a little unlucky for a big stretch through the middle part of the data, but then things evened out and I ended up winning what I was "supposed" to win overall. In other words, this is probably good, solid data to examine:
Anyway, I took these data and sorted under the filters table in PT3 to pull out just the hands from the 18.7K that I stole with. Here is that graph:
My Attempt To Steal number during this entire period was 37%, for a steal profit of $157. About half of the hands were 6max, and half were FR, but for each type my ATS was between 35-40%.

So is this the optimal stealing percentage? Dunno, but I can say that I was fairly profitable at this ATS rate. In fact, 30% of my overall profit for the entire run came from me raising in LP when it was folded around to me. Would I have earned more if I'd gone to, say, 45%? Again, dunno. Maybe more is better. Or maybe less is better. Dunno, dunno, dunno.

(As a quick aside, it's interesting to see that during the long middle stretch where I was running worse than average, I was also not winning at my steal attempts. Coincidence? Again: Dunno.)

Anyway, I'm going to poke around on the forums tonight a little and see if I can glean anything useful from the collective herd there. Exactly what is the optimal stealing rate? It changes with the tendencies of the villains you face in the blinds, of course, but there has to be an overall optimal range of stealing in LP for average opponents. It might also change as a function of the table size. Perhaps a lower stealing percentage is better at FR than 6max. Or maybe there are other factors to consider. I'll keep you posted on anything useful I find out.

All-in for now...
-Bug