Never hate your adversary blindly. Understand his motives; recognise and respect his strengths – and you will be better prepared to meet him on the battlefield.

Over the years heads up displays like Hold’em Manager and PokerTracker have become very widely used throughout the online poker community.

One thing that I’ve noticed is that, although a lot of people now have a solid grasp on statistics such as VP$IP (Voluntarily Put Money Into Pot) and PFR (Pre-Flop Raise), many people still seem to have difficulties fully understanding Aggression Factor, and are therefore unable to use it to influence their decision making.

So what is aggression factor, and why is it so important to understand this statistic? Aggression Factor (AF) is a ratio that helps you to better understand your opponent’s betting patterns. Mathematically, AF is represented as (% bet + % raise) / % call. Knowing this, it becomes fairly clear that when an opponent is betting and raising they are increasing their aggression factor, and when they are calling they are lowering it. Put simply, the lower the aggression factor, the more passive the opponent, and the higher aggression factor, the more aggressive. It’s also very important to understand that aggression factor is a function of VP$IP, e.g. if you are playing 10% of your hands, your aggression factor will be much higher than someone playing 70%.

If you’re unsure how to begin thinking about Aggression Factor, then approach it this way: An Aggression Factor of five means that an opponent is five times more likely to raise than to call.

As you approach larger sample sizes of hands for players, you should start using street by street Aggression Factors. The advantages here are numerous; at a glance you can get a much clearer indication of how somebody plays, or what their assumed weaknesses are, based on their level of aggression at each street.

If you would like to further your knowledge about this wondrous statistic, a great article that goes into depth about the profiling of opponents, which also expands on various opponents and the aggression factors you can expect to see, can be found by clicking here.

This HUD also has the following display when clicked:

Before you install the HUD, be sure to backup your current one. To do this, copy the file Layouts.pt3 from the C:\Program Files\PokerTracker 3\Data directory to another location. If you do not like my HUD, simply copy this file back into its original folder and everything will revert to how it was.

To install this HUD, first download this file: Layouts.zip

Once you have downloaded it, extract the contents to C:\Program Files\PokerTracker 3\Data, and click “yes” when prompted to overwrite the Layouts.PT3 file.

Enjoy!

I don’t want to jump the gun on this but I’m incredibly frustrated right now… I’ve put hours into making custom statistics and queries for PokerTracker 3 and not being able to get back at those is definitely a deal breaker for me…

Now, onto the juicy stuff!

Wouldn’t it be good if you could get the PokerTracker 3.x HUD to look like the screenshot on the website right out of the box? For reference here is the image from the PokerTracker website:

Unfortunately when you first install PokerTracker 3 and fire up the HUD you don’t actually have coloured stats – they’re simply white on a translucent, greyish background. PokerTracker v2.0+ with AceHud on the other hand comes with coloured ranges for VP$IP, PFR and AF right out of the box! So how do we go about getting these old colouring ranges which we are all used to into PokerTracker 3?

First of all you want to bring up the configuration for the HUD you want to modify (Cash or Tournament respectively):

In the window that appears click the “Stats” tab

On the right hand site of this window you should see a list of stats (these are the stats that show up in the active HUD). Click the stat that you want to change the range for as shown below:

Now go a bit down the window to where the tab bar is for this statistics and click “Color ranges”:

Now we need to input some ranges! To do this click Add. In the window that appears you want to enter a minimum and a maximum range. After this double click the coloured box and set the colour for the range that you specified. For reference the ranges from PokerTracker v2.0 are/were:

VP$IP:

PFR:

Total AF: