I caught a cold through the weekend and had just about enough power to lay in bed except not to get up.  (Not entirely correct since on day one of the cold I painted four rooms of the home but that's probably why I was bed-ridden the next two days...)

While laid up in bed I took some time to go over the stats for the last 25000 hands I've played since the beginning of the year.  I wanted to see what the numbers said about my winning hands empirically versus what the a priori statistics say should have won.

One of the graphs I generated was a particularly interesting one.  For pocket pairs this is my win rate when the pair makes one of the following hands: unimproved single pair two pair or a set.

Now it doesn't receive a poker talent to tell you that you'll win more if your pocket pair hits a set than if it hits two pair.  But when you're sitting on a pair of 66's or 77's and you're trying to determine when you whiff the flop and a large bluffer bets if you should call it to the river this graph provides a little guidance.  Though every situation is different those 66's are going to win unimproved about 25% of the time.

If you're comfortable with that perhaps since one or two other passive calling station players are in the pot with you then go for it.  But since your odds of hitting one of the two remaining sixes is not compensated by the size of the pot your sixes aren't likely to survive.

This graph also illustrates the fallacy of the on board two pair and shows that it makes no difference in your win rate since it's a community two pair EVERYBODY has it.  In fact you can see that sometimes it just gives you two pair and others three of a kind.  (That's where that red line dips under the blue)

This exercise of structure out a poker game empirically from a base of 25k hands played is a fun one and probably what I'll do for October and November.  I've construct out hand standards both preflop and postflop based upon what I saw in my own results.  Here's another great example:

I win very rarely with high card and one pair that I show down.  A lot of those situations are AK AQ or KQ.  With the giant caveat that all poker situations rely on the context like a general rule I need to slow down or fold hands that aren't well on their way to two pair or better on the flop.

Again I'm sure a million people have uttered this poker wisdom in one of the 200 books I have on my bookshelf but that's not my game.  My game is in the PokerTracker database I keep and when I study my game and drop the things that cost me cash my game improves.

(This exercise is called "lopping off your C game" and as far as I understand it was first coined by Tommy Angelo the Boddhisattva of Poker.)

When I looked at my graph yesterday the money I had lost calling down with 1 pair or a high card entirely offset the money I had made with the better hands.  On a more positive note I'm just about rest even for the year.

I'll post another update in 5k hands or so behind I've played my new empirical hand strategy for a while.   Before that though I'll probably post stuff from my Vegas trip in late October.