Straight Flush
Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: IRC Chat Room
Posts: 5,406
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Introduction
It's come to my attention that a lot of people aren't aware of some of the more useful features of the PokerEV software. Most people aren't aware of the extremely powerful filters that are available in the PokerEV software for analyzing your play, and I'm pretty sure most people don't know effective ways to use the Analysis tab. But never fear, Spoony's here.
The program I'm speaking of is free and available for download at http://www.pokerevsoftware.com (click 'Download Beta') and was made popular by the "Luck Graphs" and graphs comparing "Sklanskly Dollars" to your showdown winnings and actual winnings as means of determining a rough idea of how you were running. The "Luck Graphs" tab is one of the more widely known uses of the program, since it lets you know to the dollar amount how good or bad you are running in all-in situations.
However, there is much more to this program, and I think that a lot of people dismiss it as being a trivial piece of software before understanding it's functionality. I believe that PokerEV is one of the most important programs available for evaluating cash game play, and so we have this guide.
For the examples in this guide, I'll be using a 21-22k hand sample of 100nl full ring from January. Also, I'll be assuming that you understand how to load hands into the program since that's fairly basic. Let's get started.
The Graphs
I'll go ahead and cover this for the sake of completeness. There are two main graphs that PokerEV is known for, the "Game Analysis Graphs" and the "Luck Graphs". They're both pretty self-explanatory but we're actually not going to be using them very much for the main purposes of this guide. If you want to know more about them, check the FAQ page on the PokerEV website.
Getting Around The Analysis Tab
Okay so here is the meat of what I want to get at in this guide. When you click on the "Analysis" tab, you get a cool little graph, a list of hands, and a hand history frame on the right. Go up to the top-right corner and click the middle button that says graph so we can get rid of those bar graphs since we don't need them for what we're going to be doing and they take up a lot of space. Here is a picture of the graph button I'm talking about since it's kind of a pain in the ass to find if you're new to the program:
So now we have our window ready to analyze our game. You'll notice that along the top under the tabs there are a few controls. There are radio buttons that allow you to choose between showdown and non-showdown hands, and there are a few pull-down boxes that allow you to filter for individual hands. Then there is a "Clear Filters" button, which explains itself, a "More..." button that I'll get to in a moment, and a "Replay" button that allows you to replay hands over a table, since some people have a hard time just reading hand histories.
Clicking that "More..." button takes us to the advanced filters window, is the main topic of this guide. This is what the advanced filters window looks like:
A lot of people don't even know this feature exists.
Using the Advanced Filters
So suppose we want to know how we're doing with our bare flush draws in pots smaller than 50 BB in non-showdown hands. There are a few filters that we need to set to achieve this result.
If you look along the top you'll see the pull-down boxes that allow us to filter for a pot size. Let's choose "Final pot size" is "less than" 50 BB, and hit the apply button directly to the right. We'll need to hit the apply button after every individual filter we want to add, and there will be a few filters since we've set a pretty tight restriction on the hands we would like to look at. You'll quickly realize that the ability to set these tight restrictions allows you to analyze your play in ways that Poker Tracker doesn't allow for.
Now since we want to look at flush draws, under Draws, we should check "Nut Flush Draw", "2nd Nut Flush Draw", "3rd Nut Flush Draw", and "Weak Flush Draw", and then click the "Apply" button directly below.
Since we want to look at bare flush draws, and not hands that we also had a straight draw or a pair, we should go to the straight section under Draws and filter for "No Straight Draw". Also, we should go under the "Made Hand" section and filter for "High Card" since we don't want any pairs or other made hands. When you're done with these four filters, your window should look something like this:
Now we hit the exit button in the bottom-right corner, and in the top-right corner we want to click the radio button for "Non Showdown". Our filtering process is complete, and now we can easily look through hands by just clicking a hand from the list and immediately reading the hand history to the right or clicking the Replay button to see the hand played out. Also, we can now click over to the "Game Analysis Graphs" tab to see the graphs for only the hands we've filtered for. I'll show this graph for my sample here:
Notice that I won money with my bare flush draws without going to a showdown, but my Sklansky Bucks were almost breakeven. This shows the power of filtering that you can't get in Poker Tracker.
Conclusion
So I've shown you a tool for analyzing your play in depth, and there are probably hundreds (or more) of useful things to discover about your play using this software. It's free software, and it's pretty easy to figure out now that I've spelled out how to use the filters, so why not use it?
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