SPR

Please explain how this affects me, my hand, and the way I play my hand

Say your SPR is 4 and you have top pair/top kicker. That means that you probably want to go all in.

Say your SPR is 15 and you have top/top. That means you probably don't want to go all in against a typical villain that will never have worse.

This SPR is new to me. How is it calculated?

SPR = Stack to Pot Ratio.. It's the effective stack (smallest stack) on the flop divided by the initial pot on the flop. So if we are on the flop and you have $100 and I have $200, and the pot is $20, then the SPR is 5.

Oh joy.

XxStacksxX please elaborate on SPR. I've never heard of it until today and I did a search and found this thread. How does one use this figure when decideing a move or what not? Please enlighten me sir!

SPR is a very basic and necessary preflop calculation based on what your cards are designed to do. The book club is doing PNL (professional No Limit) which is where this concept is from. Basically it's about playing drawing hands differently than TPTK type hands preflop, to set up your postflop preferences. GET PNL and follow along with the book club.

Couple quick comments. As Jyms said it's something introduced and covered in PNL, which is the current book club book. If you're not doing the book club GET ON IT NOW, honestly. Read the pages for the week, make a note with what you found particularly interesting, insightful or potentially wrong and participate in the discussion in the Tools of Poker forum. I haven't done my homework for this week, but tonight is the night I planned for it and I've already skimmed the pages a couple of times.

This is the first week, and you may miss it if you don't have the book yet - but that's no real disaster. We're only covering the basics this week - next week we'll get into fundamentals. Get the book asap imo and participate in the book club.

The SPR 4 for TPTK type hands is a loose guide / rule-of-thumb. The coverage in the book goes into detail regarding how you want to vary your target SPRs based on the tendencies of the opponent. Against one opponent I might want an SPR of 2 with a top pair hand because he'll be reluctant to pay me off, against another guy who stacks off with second pair I'm happy to stack off with an SPR up to maybe 8 or so.

As everything else, it's opponent dependent. You need to know your opponent, what he plays, how he plays it etc. But the default numbers give you a sanity check against unknowns.