I recently downloaded the 60-day trial for PokerTracker 3. I highly recommend it. It's so useful I didn't even want to write this post because I don't want any of you using it against me :)
Anyway, it integrates with some of the poker sites (like Full Tilt, but not Cake) and keeps track of all your hands via hand history files. From those histories, it can give you information like what percent of the time a player raises preflop, what percent of the time a player voluntarily puts money into a pot, and other aggregate calculations like "aggression factor". It tracks a lot more than that, too.
So what, right? Well, it overlays these stats right on the poker site user interface, so you get all this data real-time and right there. Better yet, you can open up tables that you aren't playing on and track stats for all the players. That comes in handy during multi-table tournaments... It's as if you were playing with everybody since the start of the tournament!
Anyway, PT3 came in really handy a couple days back when Chad and I were playing $0.25/$0.50 on Full Tilt. We hadn't seen aces in ages (or so it seemed) except when our jacks, queens, and kings were running into them. Finally, we got them and everybody folded to our raise. We got them again, this time in the small blind, and everybody folded to the button. The button put in a standard 3x raise to $1.50.
Normally, I'd keep the re-raise small enough to keep the player in; say $4 or $4.50. However, a quick scan of the PT stats and it turns out this player played 46 hands with us and hadn't raised a single pot (not once) and only put money into the pot about 10% of the times they could. We put him on KK or QQ and jammed it to $7, hoping we could get him to commit the full $50 preflop. He obliged by raising to $20 and calling our shove. Awesome!
He shows KK, we show our aces, and the door card is a K! LOL. Luckily the next card that slid out on the flop was the ace, baby! A quick $50. I doubt the guy would have gotten away from his kings, but it sure was nice to know he had them before making any decisions!
