[Cyrus]

I think we are fundamentally confused here. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

There are two things: One is your conditional expectation, meaning what to do in the specific situation in front of you. In other words, you are seeking to maximize the chance P of your winning in A when givent the conditions B, aka Pw(A|B). The other thing is the historical overview of your performance.

The two are not the same thing - and I would categorically agree that the second kind of analysis would help you little in the first endeavor.

[ QUOTE ]
Lets start from a most fundamental scenario - It is the preflop. You are on the button with A8o and it is folded to the cutoff who raises. What is your play? You can call, raise, or fold.

Now, in this situation all you care about is if you should call, raise, or fold. You dont care about anything that doesnt help you determine which of the 3 options you should take. Everything in poker boils down to a decision and any information that isnt actionable is worthless.

Therefore, in the above scenario you dont care about the following:
1) Your historical win/loss
2) How often you raise preflop (other than how it affects other player's perception of you)
3) How often you call preflop
4) Any objective measure of your game.

[/ QUOTE ] I agree.

(But I can't help noticing that you just referred, in #4 above, to "the objective measure of my game". [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] Didn't you just write that "We just can't measure things objectively" ??)

These "little stat trackers" such as PT or StatKing only inform you how you have been doing in the past, overall. To give an elementary example: If you have been playing in a wide variety of medium limit hold'em games for a significant amount of rounds, but nothing of the extreme kind, i.e. no games with mostly excellent players nor games with mostly bad players, and your little stat tracker tells you that you have been involved in something like 50% of the pots - then, brother, the next time you are faced with A8o that lit'l stat means nothing for sure, but when that game is over and you head home, you better sit down and do a serious re-evaluation of your whole game, because more probably than not you have a leak. Of the loose kind. You probable need to tighten the screws, some.

(Notice how cleverly I slipped the words "screw" and "loose" in our dialogue. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img])

[ QUOTE ]
What players do is use intuition and starting hand charts and what not to guide them through the game. But, these are very broad strokes. Math cannot solve this. If someone disagrees please tell me how.

[/ QUOTE ] When I wrote above that the 50% participation in flops is probably excessive, that is not based on intuition or any "broad stroke". Under the conditions I formulated for your record (many games, good games, nothing excessive, limits) you most probably have negative EV by seeing half the flops. And this is not intuitive.

Now, I have no idea how to put together a poker bot but in the scenario you gave (A8o on the button, folded to CO who raises), there are very specific parameters that can be entered and be helpful in the assessment of the situation, i.e. searching for the what-to-do. Such as, the perception of other players abt your playing style (which, please note, takes into account your stats in that game, tracked via a ...little stat tracker); the other players' style (ditto), if possible over a longer timeframe than just that particular game; the mathematical expectation of an A8o aganist random hands to the river (derived from sims); the size of the pot already; etc etc.

But I can't help thinking that we started this whole thing on a big misunderstanding.

--Cyrus