If you are new to poker software you can initially ignore all statistics except the essential three poker statistics. Once you have understood how to use the basic statistics, you can add more depending on your style of play, and your chosen table size. Planning Poker is an agile estimating and planning technique that is consensus based. To start a poker planning session, the product owner or customer reads an agile user story or describes a feature to the estimators. Each estimator is holding a deck of Planning Poker cards with values. Card Values/Scoring While Poker is played in innumerable forms, a player who understands the values of the Poker hands and the principles of betting can play without difficulty in any type of Poker game. Except in a few versions of the game, a Poker hand consists of five cards.
The suits are all of equal value - no suit is higher than any other suit. In Poker, the Ace is the highest card and the 2 card (Deuce) is the lowest. However, the Ace can also be used as a low card, with the value of 1. We offer daily poker news, poker professionals' blogs and tweets, exclusive poker videos, thousands of free poker articles, as well as coverage from all major poker tournaments in the world.
Which poker stats are most important?
Our poker HUD software offers a large amount of statistics. Knowing which ones are relevant and important can be overwhelming. If you are new to poker software you can initially ignore all statistics except the essential three poker statistics. Once you have understood how to use the basic statistics, you can add more depending on your style of play, and your chosen table size.
The big three poker statistics (and one bonus stat):
- Voluntarily Put $ in Pot (VPIP)
- Preflop Raise (PFR)
- Postflop Aggression Frequency (Agg)
- A bonus stat: Big blinds won/100 hands.
These three statistics are a great starting point to get an idea of a person's playing style. They only require 25 hands or so to reliably give a good idea of a player's tendencies.
Voluntarily Put $ in Pot (VPIP)
VPIP in poker measures how often you voluntarily pay money into a hand before seeing the flop. Paying the big blind, the small blind, or the ante is not considered voluntary. Therefore this percentage indicates how often you called, bet, or raised. The lower this value, the tighter your hand selection is. The higher, the looser. Only preflop betting is taken into account.
Good players know to only invest money in the pot when they have decent starting hands. A simple way to measure whether you are doing this is to keep your VPIP at a sensible value.
What is a good number for VPIP?
Simple answer: between 15% and 20%. This assumes you want to play tightly, you are playing micro-stakes, and you are playing on full ring cash tables.
Now the more complicated answer: it depends a lot. If you are still learning to play good poker, then you should be very selective in which hands you play, so your VPIP might acceptably be a tad lower than 15%. The less people on the table, the more hands you can play. If you are on a table full of ultralight players, you can also loosen up. An experienced player who understands the subtleties of the game can get away with a VPIP between 20% and 27%. In 6-max or heads-up, most players have a much higher VPIP. In Pot Limit Omaha, VPIP values will be even higher.
Preflop Raise (PFR)
The PFR statistic indicates how often you have raised before the flop is seen. A high value is an indicator of an aggressive player. A low value indicates a passive player. Good players are aggressive players.
Your PFR has a possible range between a minumum of 0% and a maximum equal to the value of your VPIP. That is, if your VPIP is 20%, then your PFR can't be higher than 20%. Ideally it should be a little lower than your VPIP, but not much lower.
Poor players and beginners play timidly. They call too often preflop. Good players frequently fold or raise preflop, especially if no other players have yet raised. If you are not prepared to raise, then you should consider folding. Calling preflop just in case the flop is good for you is not a winning poker strategy.
What is a good PFR range?
Between 2% and 3% lower than VPIP. If your VPIP is 15%, PFR should be about 12%. These two numbers in combination indicate that you are only playing quality hole cards, and you are predominantly raising with them pre-flop. In other words, you are playing how most poker books and poker forums say you should play.
Postflop Aggression Frequency (Agg)
Agg indicates how aggressively you play postflop. The higher this number, the more aggressively you are playing. This must be interpreted in combination with VPIP. Players who see very few flops will naturally tend to have a higher aggression percentage because they are only playing top-quality hole cards.
Poor players play passively postflop. They'll check or call too often. Good players know to play good hands aggressively postflop:
- because players with speculative hands are forced to fold before they get free cards
- because if they hit the flop or have a dominating hand, a bet or raise will increase their return
What is a good Agg range?
50% to 60% is ideal, assuming that you have a VPIP of 15% to 20%. Much higher, and you are probably overplaying speculative hands and bad hands, and bluffing too much. Much lower and you are not playing your good hands strongly postflop.
Leave the bluffing for the movies and for live play. At low stakes online play, bluffing is much less important than a good understanding of the probabilities of winning hands.
Big blinds won/100 hands
The three stats I've presented so far mean nothing if you can't keep your win rate positive. A nice way to 'normalize' your win rate across different stake levels, table sizes, and opponents is to measure how much you won in terms of the big blind. If you are playing at a table where the big blind is $0.50, and you won $20, then think of this as winning 40 big blinds.
If this number is not positive, then you are losing money. The best remedy is to drop to a lower stake level, where the opponents are weaker. If, according to this stat, you consistently win over time, then you should consider going up to a higher stake level.
Adjusting your play based on the villain's poker stats
This is where our poker HUD software gets really useful: analyzing and exploiting opponent weaknesses. Let's consider some hypothetical players:
Tight Tim has VPIP of 5%, PFR of 5%, and Agg of 100%
With such a low VPIP, we can guess that this player folds anything except the very best hands. And with a PFR equal to VPIP, when he gets premium hands, he raises. So if this player raises, and you are next to act, you know that you should fold every hand except the best few hands, such as AA, KK, QQ. You can be almost certain that if you go to the flop, he'll raise postflop. So play tighter than usual with this player. But when you do get a premium hand, and he comes along, you can be sure that player B will put plenty of chips into the pot. Your pot, hopefully.
Passive Pete has VPIP of 20%, PFR of 16%, and Agg of 10%.
Poker Values Chart
This player seems take have a good handle on preflop play. But when he gets to the flop, he gets timid. He is probably going to give you a chance postflop to see the turn and river for free. If you go to the flop with him and raise, there is a good chance he'll fold. So you can play a bit more aggressively both preflop and postflop.
Eddie the Eagle has VPIP of 22%, PFR of 19%, and Agg of 55%.
Eddie has a good all-round balance between preflop and postflop play. Preflop, he plays tight and aggressively. Postflop, he balances between pushing hard with his good hands, and being willing to fold or check with his weaker hands. Eddie would be well-served to move on to understanding more advanced poker statistics.
Tracking your poker stats
Poker players use poker software like Poker Copilot to automatically record their hands. Each hand is broken down into many statistics, which are then aggregated into simple percentages.
Poker Statistics Guide
What's next after you've understood the basic poker stats? Read our Poker Statistics Guide for a comprehensive explanation of understanding and using all the main poker statistics.
Planning poker, also called Scrum poker, is a consensus-based, gamified technique for estimating, mostly used to estimate effort or relative size of development goals in software development. In planning poker, members of the group make estimates by playing numbered cards face-down to the table, instead of speaking them aloud. The cards are revealed, and the estimates are then discussed. By hiding the figures in this way, the group can avoid the cognitive bias of anchoring, where the first number spoken aloud sets a precedent for subsequent estimates.
Planning poker is a variation of the Wideband delphi method. It is most commonly used in agile software development, in particular in Scrum and Extreme Programming.
The method was first defined and named by James Grenning in 2002[1] and later popularized by Mike Cohn in the book Agile Estimating and Planning,[2] whose company trade marked the term [3] and a digital online tool.[4]
Process[edit]
Rationale[edit]
The reason to use planning poker is to avoid the influence of the other participants. If a number is spoken, it can sound like a suggestion and influence the other participants' sizing. Planning poker should force people to think independently and propose their numbers simultaneously. This is accomplished by requiring that all participants show their card at the same time.
Equipment[edit]
Planning poker is based on a list of features to be delivered, several copies of a deck of cards and optionally, an egg timer that can be used to limit time spent in discussion of each item.
The feature list, often a list of user stories, describes some software that needs to be developed.
The cards in the deck have numbers on them. A typical deck has cards showing the Fibonacci sequence including a zero: 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89; other decks use similar progressions with a fixed ratio between each value such as 1, 2, 4, 8, etc.
The reason for using the Fibonacci sequence instead of simply doubling each subsequent value is because estimating a task as exactly double the effort as another task is misleadingly precise. A task which is about twice as much effort as a 5, has to be evaluated as either a bit less than double (8) or a bit more than double (13).
Several commercially available decks use the sequence: 0, ½, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100, and optionally a ? (unsure), an infinity symbol (this task cannot be completed) and a coffee cup (I need a break, and I will make the rest of the team coffee). The reason for not exactly following the Fibonacci sequence after 13 is because someone once said to Mike Cohn 'You must be very certain to have estimated that task as 21 instead of 20.' Using numbers with only a single digit of precision (except for 13) indicates the uncertainty in the estimation. Some organizations[which?] use standard playing cards of Ace, 2, 3, 5, 8 and king. Where king means: 'this item is too big or too complicated to estimate'. 'Throwing a king' ends discussion of the item for the current sprint.
Smartphones allow developers to use mobile apps instead of physical card decks. When teams are not in the same geographical locations, collaborative software can be used as replacement for physical cards.
Procedure[edit]
At the estimation meeting, each estimator is given one deck of the cards. All decks have identical sets of cards in them.
The meeting proceeds as follows:
Card Values Poker
- A Moderator, who will not play, chairs the meeting.
- The Product Owner provides a short overview of one user story to be estimated. The team is given an opportunity to ask questions and discuss to clarify assumptions and risks. A summary of the discussion is recorded, e.g. by the Moderator.
- Each individual lays a card face down representing their estimate for the story. Units used vary - they can be days duration, ideal days or story points. During discussion, numbers must not be mentioned at all in relation to feature size to avoid anchoring.
- Everyone calls their cards simultaneously by turning them over.
- People with high estimates and low estimates are given a soap box to offer their justification for their estimate and then discussion continues.
- Repeat the estimation process until a consensus is reached. The developer who was likely to own the deliverable has a large portion of the 'consensus vote', although the Moderator can negotiate the consensus.
- To ensure that discussion is structured; the Moderator or the Product Owner may at any point turn over the egg timer and when it runs out all discussion must cease and another round of poker is played. The structure in the conversation is re-introduced by the soap boxes.
The cards are numbered as they are to account for the fact that the longer an estimate is, the more uncertainty it contains. Thus, if a developer wants to play a 6 he is forced to reconsider and either work through that some of the perceived uncertainty does not exist and play a 5, or accept a conservative estimate accounting for the uncertainty and play an 8.
Benefits[edit]
Poker Chip Values For $20 Buy In
A study by Moløkken-Østvold and Haugen[5] reported that planning poker provided accurate estimates of programming task completion time, although estimates by any individual developer who entered a task into the task tracker was just as accurate. Tasks discussed during planning poker rounds took longer to complete than those not discussed and included more code deletions, suggesting that planning poker caused more attention to code quality. Planning poker was considered by the study participants to be effective at facilitating team coordination and discussion of implementation strategies.
- Voluntarily Put $ in Pot (VPIP)
- Preflop Raise (PFR)
- Postflop Aggression Frequency (Agg)
- A bonus stat: Big blinds won/100 hands.
These three statistics are a great starting point to get an idea of a person's playing style. They only require 25 hands or so to reliably give a good idea of a player's tendencies.
Voluntarily Put $ in Pot (VPIP)
VPIP in poker measures how often you voluntarily pay money into a hand before seeing the flop. Paying the big blind, the small blind, or the ante is not considered voluntary. Therefore this percentage indicates how often you called, bet, or raised. The lower this value, the tighter your hand selection is. The higher, the looser. Only preflop betting is taken into account.
Good players know to only invest money in the pot when they have decent starting hands. A simple way to measure whether you are doing this is to keep your VPIP at a sensible value.
What is a good number for VPIP?
Simple answer: between 15% and 20%. This assumes you want to play tightly, you are playing micro-stakes, and you are playing on full ring cash tables.
Now the more complicated answer: it depends a lot. If you are still learning to play good poker, then you should be very selective in which hands you play, so your VPIP might acceptably be a tad lower than 15%. The less people on the table, the more hands you can play. If you are on a table full of ultralight players, you can also loosen up. An experienced player who understands the subtleties of the game can get away with a VPIP between 20% and 27%. In 6-max or heads-up, most players have a much higher VPIP. In Pot Limit Omaha, VPIP values will be even higher.
Preflop Raise (PFR)
The PFR statistic indicates how often you have raised before the flop is seen. A high value is an indicator of an aggressive player. A low value indicates a passive player. Good players are aggressive players.
Your PFR has a possible range between a minumum of 0% and a maximum equal to the value of your VPIP. That is, if your VPIP is 20%, then your PFR can't be higher than 20%. Ideally it should be a little lower than your VPIP, but not much lower.
Poor players and beginners play timidly. They call too often preflop. Good players frequently fold or raise preflop, especially if no other players have yet raised. If you are not prepared to raise, then you should consider folding. Calling preflop just in case the flop is good for you is not a winning poker strategy.
What is a good PFR range?
Between 2% and 3% lower than VPIP. If your VPIP is 15%, PFR should be about 12%. These two numbers in combination indicate that you are only playing quality hole cards, and you are predominantly raising with them pre-flop. In other words, you are playing how most poker books and poker forums say you should play.
Postflop Aggression Frequency (Agg)
Agg indicates how aggressively you play postflop. The higher this number, the more aggressively you are playing. This must be interpreted in combination with VPIP. Players who see very few flops will naturally tend to have a higher aggression percentage because they are only playing top-quality hole cards.
Poor players play passively postflop. They'll check or call too often. Good players know to play good hands aggressively postflop:
- because players with speculative hands are forced to fold before they get free cards
- because if they hit the flop or have a dominating hand, a bet or raise will increase their return
What is a good Agg range?
50% to 60% is ideal, assuming that you have a VPIP of 15% to 20%. Much higher, and you are probably overplaying speculative hands and bad hands, and bluffing too much. Much lower and you are not playing your good hands strongly postflop.
Leave the bluffing for the movies and for live play. At low stakes online play, bluffing is much less important than a good understanding of the probabilities of winning hands.
Big blinds won/100 hands
The three stats I've presented so far mean nothing if you can't keep your win rate positive. A nice way to 'normalize' your win rate across different stake levels, table sizes, and opponents is to measure how much you won in terms of the big blind. If you are playing at a table where the big blind is $0.50, and you won $20, then think of this as winning 40 big blinds.
If this number is not positive, then you are losing money. The best remedy is to drop to a lower stake level, where the opponents are weaker. If, according to this stat, you consistently win over time, then you should consider going up to a higher stake level.
Adjusting your play based on the villain's poker stats
This is where our poker HUD software gets really useful: analyzing and exploiting opponent weaknesses. Let's consider some hypothetical players:
Tight Tim has VPIP of 5%, PFR of 5%, and Agg of 100%
With such a low VPIP, we can guess that this player folds anything except the very best hands. And with a PFR equal to VPIP, when he gets premium hands, he raises. So if this player raises, and you are next to act, you know that you should fold every hand except the best few hands, such as AA, KK, QQ. You can be almost certain that if you go to the flop, he'll raise postflop. So play tighter than usual with this player. But when you do get a premium hand, and he comes along, you can be sure that player B will put plenty of chips into the pot. Your pot, hopefully.
Passive Pete has VPIP of 20%, PFR of 16%, and Agg of 10%.
Poker Values Chart
This player seems take have a good handle on preflop play. But when he gets to the flop, he gets timid. He is probably going to give you a chance postflop to see the turn and river for free. If you go to the flop with him and raise, there is a good chance he'll fold. So you can play a bit more aggressively both preflop and postflop.
Eddie the Eagle has VPIP of 22%, PFR of 19%, and Agg of 55%.
Eddie has a good all-round balance between preflop and postflop play. Preflop, he plays tight and aggressively. Postflop, he balances between pushing hard with his good hands, and being willing to fold or check with his weaker hands. Eddie would be well-served to move on to understanding more advanced poker statistics.
Tracking your poker stats
Poker players use poker software like Poker Copilot to automatically record their hands. Each hand is broken down into many statistics, which are then aggregated into simple percentages.
Poker Statistics Guide
What's next after you've understood the basic poker stats? Read our Poker Statistics Guide for a comprehensive explanation of understanding and using all the main poker statistics.
Planning poker, also called Scrum poker, is a consensus-based, gamified technique for estimating, mostly used to estimate effort or relative size of development goals in software development. In planning poker, members of the group make estimates by playing numbered cards face-down to the table, instead of speaking them aloud. The cards are revealed, and the estimates are then discussed. By hiding the figures in this way, the group can avoid the cognitive bias of anchoring, where the first number spoken aloud sets a precedent for subsequent estimates.
Planning poker is a variation of the Wideband delphi method. It is most commonly used in agile software development, in particular in Scrum and Extreme Programming.
The method was first defined and named by James Grenning in 2002[1] and later popularized by Mike Cohn in the book Agile Estimating and Planning,[2] whose company trade marked the term [3] and a digital online tool.[4]
Process[edit]
Rationale[edit]
The reason to use planning poker is to avoid the influence of the other participants. If a number is spoken, it can sound like a suggestion and influence the other participants' sizing. Planning poker should force people to think independently and propose their numbers simultaneously. This is accomplished by requiring that all participants show their card at the same time.
Equipment[edit]
Planning poker is based on a list of features to be delivered, several copies of a deck of cards and optionally, an egg timer that can be used to limit time spent in discussion of each item.
The feature list, often a list of user stories, describes some software that needs to be developed.
The cards in the deck have numbers on them. A typical deck has cards showing the Fibonacci sequence including a zero: 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89; other decks use similar progressions with a fixed ratio between each value such as 1, 2, 4, 8, etc.
The reason for using the Fibonacci sequence instead of simply doubling each subsequent value is because estimating a task as exactly double the effort as another task is misleadingly precise. A task which is about twice as much effort as a 5, has to be evaluated as either a bit less than double (8) or a bit more than double (13).
Several commercially available decks use the sequence: 0, ½, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100, and optionally a ? (unsure), an infinity symbol (this task cannot be completed) and a coffee cup (I need a break, and I will make the rest of the team coffee). The reason for not exactly following the Fibonacci sequence after 13 is because someone once said to Mike Cohn 'You must be very certain to have estimated that task as 21 instead of 20.' Using numbers with only a single digit of precision (except for 13) indicates the uncertainty in the estimation. Some organizations[which?] use standard playing cards of Ace, 2, 3, 5, 8 and king. Where king means: 'this item is too big or too complicated to estimate'. 'Throwing a king' ends discussion of the item for the current sprint.
Smartphones allow developers to use mobile apps instead of physical card decks. When teams are not in the same geographical locations, collaborative software can be used as replacement for physical cards.
Procedure[edit]
At the estimation meeting, each estimator is given one deck of the cards. All decks have identical sets of cards in them.
The meeting proceeds as follows:
Card Values Poker
- A Moderator, who will not play, chairs the meeting.
- The Product Owner provides a short overview of one user story to be estimated. The team is given an opportunity to ask questions and discuss to clarify assumptions and risks. A summary of the discussion is recorded, e.g. by the Moderator.
- Each individual lays a card face down representing their estimate for the story. Units used vary - they can be days duration, ideal days or story points. During discussion, numbers must not be mentioned at all in relation to feature size to avoid anchoring.
- Everyone calls their cards simultaneously by turning them over.
- People with high estimates and low estimates are given a soap box to offer their justification for their estimate and then discussion continues.
- Repeat the estimation process until a consensus is reached. The developer who was likely to own the deliverable has a large portion of the 'consensus vote', although the Moderator can negotiate the consensus.
- To ensure that discussion is structured; the Moderator or the Product Owner may at any point turn over the egg timer and when it runs out all discussion must cease and another round of poker is played. The structure in the conversation is re-introduced by the soap boxes.
The cards are numbered as they are to account for the fact that the longer an estimate is, the more uncertainty it contains. Thus, if a developer wants to play a 6 he is forced to reconsider and either work through that some of the perceived uncertainty does not exist and play a 5, or accept a conservative estimate accounting for the uncertainty and play an 8.
Benefits[edit]
Poker Chip Values For $20 Buy In
A study by Moløkken-Østvold and Haugen[5] reported that planning poker provided accurate estimates of programming task completion time, although estimates by any individual developer who entered a task into the task tracker was just as accurate. Tasks discussed during planning poker rounds took longer to complete than those not discussed and included more code deletions, suggesting that planning poker caused more attention to code quality. Planning poker was considered by the study participants to be effective at facilitating team coordination and discussion of implementation strategies.
See also[edit]
Poker Values Of Hands
- Comparison of Scrum software, which generally has support for planning poker, either included or as an optional add-on.
References[edit]
- ^'Wingman Software | Planning Poker - The Original Paper'. wingman-sw.com. Retrieved 5 July 2017.
- ^Mike Cohn (November 2005). 'Agile Estimating and Planning'. Mountain Goat Software. Retrieved 1 February 2008.
- ^'Planning poker - Trademark, Service Mark #3473287'. Trademark Status & Document Retrieval (TSDR). 15 January 2008. Retrieved 26 May 2014.
- ^Cohn, Mike. 'Planning Poker Cards: Effective Agile Planning and Estimation'. Mountain Goat Software. Mountain Goat Software. Retrieved 30 March 2016.
- ^K Moløkken-Østvold, NC Haugen (10–13 April 2007). 'Combining Estimates with Planning Poker—An Empirical Study'. 18th Australian Software Engineering Conference. IEEE: 349–58. doi:10.1109/ASWEC.2007.15. ISBN978-0-7695-2778-9. S2CID11429738.
- Mike Cohn (2005). Agile Estimating and Planning (1 ed.). Prentice Hall PTR. ISBN978-0-13-147941-8.
