U.S. Players Welcome!Online Poker: The Three Basic Stats
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If you read any online poker strategy discussion group, you'll see people using three basic stats to offer a quick outline of their opponents' play. All major tracking programs will calculate these stats for every player in your database. These stats are:
The first two stats measure only preflop play, while the third measures a player's aggression over all streets.
Voluntarily Put Money In The Pot Percentage (VP$IP) measures the percentage of hands a player plays preflop, excluding hands where the player checks from the big blind, but including hands where the player limps in or raises and then folds to a raise or reraise. This stat measures how tight or loose a player plays.
In a 6-max game, this stat generally ranges from 10 percent to 80 percent. A player with a 10 percent VP$IP plays exceedingly tightly, likely playing only pocket pairs and perhaps AK and AQ. A player with an 80 percent VP$IP is extremely loose and plays nearly every hand.
Most online 6-max players tend to fall in a range between about 15 and 30. Players with a VP$IP over 40 tend to be loose and bad players, so you can use the stat to aid in your table selection. For example, if you were choosing between two tables, one where everyone had a VP$IP under 25, and one where two of the players were over 50, you'd want to choose the table with the two loose players.
Preflop Raise Percentage (PFR) measures the percentage of hands a player raises preflop. PFR is never higher than VP$IP, because every time a player raises preflop, they are voluntarily putting money in the pot as well.
Most good players have a PFR within a few percentage points of their VP$IP. For instance, a solid player might have a VP$IP of 24 and a PFR of 20 (written 24/20 from now on). This indicates that the player raises most of the time that he plays a hand, only occasionally limping in, cold-calling a raise, or calling from the blinds.
Aggression Factor (AF) measures how often a player takes an aggressive action (bet or raise) versus a passive one (call). Checks and folds are ignored for the purposes of calculating AF.
This stat, unlike the previous two, is calculated using actions on all four betting rounds. (Some formulas exclude preflop play and include only the three postflop rounds.) It is calculated as a ratio - the number of aggressive plays divided by the number of passive ones. Because it's a ratio, the values can range from 0 (if the player in question has never bet or raised) to infinite (if he has never once called).
In practice a player with an AF between 0 and 1 is fairly passive, tending to call more often than bet or raise. And a player with an AF of 4, 5, or more, is quite aggressive, betting and raising far more frequently than calling.
AF can be a difficult stat to interpret correctly. First of all, a high AF is more significant for a player with a high VP$IP than it is for a player with a low one. If you play 50 percent of your hands and you still bet and raise 4 times more often than you call, you are necessarily betting and raising with a wide range of very weak hands. Whereas, if you play only 15 percent of your hands, betting and raising 4 times more often than calling doesn't suggest nearly as reckless a style.
Also, AF measures play across all betting rounds, and therefore two players with an AF of 3 could play very different styles - one, perhaps, focusing on flop aggression, while the other focuses on river aggression.
In recent years this stat, once a staple of player profiling, has lost some of its importance because newer versions of tracking software packages have provided easier to interpret stats based on street-by-street play. Nevertheless, you will still often see this stat used as one of the three basic stats to describe an opponent's style.
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