What Does the Acronym PFR Mean?
PFR stands for “preflop raiser”. It indicates how many hands a player raises on the first betting round (preflop in Hold’em).
It’s calculated as follows -
Number of Raises Preflop / Number of Raise Opportunities Preflop
Any raise / raise-opportunity counts, not just open-raises. For example, any time we face an open-raise, we have a raise opportunity since we can 3bet.
A player’s PFR stat is often cited alongside their “VPIP” to give a rough overall indication of a player type. VPIP stands for “voluntarily put in pot”. It is a measure of how frequently a player enters the pot preflop either by raising or calling.
Example of PFR used in a sentence -> Judging by his VPIP and PFR this guy is a nit.
PFR Poker Strategy
Online players are especially interested in PFR since it’s one of the main stats tracked by poker tracking software. The higher a player’s PFR stat, the wider the range of hands he plays aggressively preflop.
What constitutes “high” or “low” for PFR depends on the poker variant in question. For example, in 6-max NLHE cash games, an average winning player usually has a PFR somewhere between 16 and 22. As a rough guide, anything outside of these bounds constitutes an overly aggressive or overly passive opponent.
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