Do Stats Programs Cause Bad Decisions?

There is tons of good stats programs out there for poker players, and most of them seem to be pretty useful. I feel like there is a huge potential to be swayed by a players stats and a player might wind up ignoring the information at hand.

your opponent's stats are a good thing to keep in mind. If you know what kind of hands he is willing to raise with and from what seats, this can certainly be useful information. But when the pots get big and I am faced with a real decision, this kind of information has sometimes gotten into my head and caused me to make some bad decision.

As a result, I have been trying to ignore some of the stats provided by things like poker tracker and other programs when I get deep into a hand. I like to use this info to classify my opponents, but not necessarily to figure out what they have. I just use it to try and get to know each player, but I don't forget that just because a player tends to do something a certain way, they wont necessarily have the cards that they are supposed to have.

I don't use stat program - but a lot of that has to do with not playing online cash games (only tournaments). I do use sharkscope and pokerdb etc to look up opponents stats though.

With that said - the more information to make a decision with the better imo. However, always to much emphasis can be given to information and sometimes there is information I wish I didn't have.

One example I recall years ago was at a bar room tournament. Here we would get 30-40 guys and play $20 unlimited rebuy for the first two hours (included meel and free drinks during break if you made it that far and everyone wanted to make it to that hour break which had great food) it was wild with some guys buying in 7-8 times the first two hours.

Anyways once per month we did a $50 rebuy and made the prize pool more top heavy than the $20 one. These were local guys you played with (same people each night) so bragging rights almost as important in this particular tournament.

With 5 to go, I picked up an obvious tell on a player. As he looked at his cards he store for an extra second I seen his puplils get a bit larger as he looked down at his chips immediately after. He has to have a big pair. I look down and get pocket jacks.. I'm acting before him and not sure what to do now. I decide to limp hoping to call a small raise and now stuck playing these for set value. He does in fact raise, I call the flop comes 9 high, he bets I muck another guy pushes all in, he snap calls I see I'm against A9 and TT. Maybe I would of got pushed off the over pair anyways, I don't know but i remember feeling sick. I never contemplated that the big pair I had read him for could have been smaller than the jacks I picked up. He won this tournament, I don't think he is good enough that I would not have busted him there if I played the hand without that read. (A9 was much shorter stacked and wouldn't have hurt either of us, we could of played against each other ignoring that player).