Tips on conditioning reports

We have a couple of tips explaining how the new reports works and what you can do to use them as best as you can.

Health

First of all, three of the new reports are connected to the Health app of your iOS device:

  • Sleep
  • Calories
  • Workouts

To be able to launch one of these reports, you’ll need to input some data into the Health app.

A number of apps now are helping you doing this. For example, you can use Sleep Cycle to track your sleep, or Runkeeper for running. You may already have one without being aware, so if you’re using some tracking app, check out in your Health app if you have some data.

When launching one of these reports, Poker Analytics 4 searches for sessions with health data and compute the maths to show you the influence of sleep and physical activity on your results.

Poker Analytics 4 needs the access to the Health data to do this. You’ll be automatically asked for this within the app. However, if you refused to give the app access to these data, you’ll have to change that in the Settings of your iPhone.

Samples

We usually like to keep things open to give you maximum control over your data. However, the default reports might require some filtering.

Typically, the duration report is an amazing tool for cash games, as you’ll be able to learn when you start getting tired. The point here is that this report won’t tell you much with your tournament data. When you play a tournament, the longer you last, the more chance you have to win big. So there isn’t much to learn for tournaments with the duration report. Also, mixing tournaments and cash games obviously won’t give great results. So what you need to do is to filter your data on cash games to be able to exploit the results of the report.

The algorithm we use averages your results. In poker, you should know that a small sample size isn’t representative of the reality. This is the same for the conditioning reports. In your data set, you’ll probably find some ranges with only a few results like a couple of sessions with 4 hours of sleep. Make sure that you don’t take results too seriously when the sample size is limited.

In the same fashion, some sessions with unusually good or bad results may have an big impact on the report. For example, you played a long cash game with a whale for 12 hours – whereas you never play sessions longer than 6 hours – and made a huge profit. The duration graph will show a great average result from 6 to 12 hours of play, but it doesn’t mean you should play longer. The purpose of the report is to show you when to stop due to fatigue, so make sure to filter out the sessions that present an exceptional factor.

To summarize, whatever you’re looking out, make sure that the sample size is relevant and take the time to analyze what you see before drawing a quick conclusion. Sleep well!