The red line is in the minus, and it looks like a diagnosis: you bluff too little, you give up too often. Forums advise "lifting the red line" with aggression. Sometimes it helps, more often it does not, because the red line by itself measures neither bluffs nor folds. Let us look at what it does measure. Spoiler: mostly the blinds.
What the lines are made of
The tracker splits the result of every hand into two parts:
| Line | What goes into it |
|---|---|
| Blue, showdown winnings | The result of hands that reached showdown |
| Red, non-showdown winnings | The result of hands that ended without showdown, including folded blinds |
| Green | The sum of the two, the overall result |
The second point matters: the red line includes every hand where you posted a blind and folded it preflop. Over 100,000 hands that is tens of thousands of blinds leaving without showdown. So the red line of an honest tight player starts with a negative slope before they have made a single postflop decision. You have not had a chance to do anything wrong yet, and it is already going down.
Why the red line usually goes down for winning regs
There are three structural reasons, and none of them is a mistake.
First, the blinds described above. Second, big pots reach showdown more often: when you win a stack it is almost always the blue line. The small pots you give up on the flop and turn go into the red one. Third, against a pool that calls down, the profitable strategy shifts toward value: you bluff less often and take fewer pots without showdown, while earning at showdown. Bluffing against someone who does not fold is noble, but unprofitable.
So the pair "blue steeply up, red gently down" at NL25–NL100 more often describes a normal winning reg than a player with a leak.
When a red-line minus costs money
The red line becomes useful when it is read not as a whole but by spot. Non-showdown money leaves in a few typical places:
- River folds with bluffcatchers. This is the most common and most expensive finding in the databases of mid-stakes regs. The pot is already large, the hand beats bluffs, and a fold gives it away whole and without showdown.
- Giving up the turn after a flop cbet. You bet the flop, got called, checked the turn and folded to a bet. Every such hand goes into the red line. The bet / check / fold line is the most popular line in poker that nobody ever planned.
- BB defense. Too tight a defense against steals means thousands of folded blinds, too wide means calls that are then given up on the flop.
- No 3bets in the bluffing part of the range. Pots that could have been taken preflop go to the opener.
They have to be checked separately, and in each case the question is the same: would the other action have paid off? For a river fold that is a comparison with a call by the price of the bet and the share of bluffs in the opponent's range. For giving up the turn it is a comparison with continued aggression on this texture against this pool.
What not to do with the red line
- Do not lift it for its own sake. A bluff added where the pool does not fold will move the minus from the red line to the blue one and make it bigger. The red line will look prettier; the balance will not.
- Do not compare your red line with someone else's without accounting for style and position. A player with a wide BB defense has a lower one by definition.
- Do not draw conclusions from a short stretch. The red line is less noisy than the blue one, but it too needs hundreds of thousands of hands for a stable slope.
How to read the lines properly
Look at both lines by position and by spot, not at the overall graph. Compare not the slope but the specific decisions that form it: how many pots were given up on the river without showdown, how many on the turn after a cbet, how many blinds were folded against BTN steals. Each of these decisions has a price in bb, and that is what needs counting. The slope of a graph has no price. It only has a colour.