[Utah]

Hi Cryus,

Okay, that is a lot of slicing and dicing of my comments so I am not sure exactly how to respond as there are a lot of ways to look at this issue [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] Therefore, I will take an initial stab and please direct me if I am not answering your question.

Lets start from a most fundamental scenario - It is the preflop. You are on the button with A,8o 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

The reason is that these things cannot help you in your decision. Thus, looking at your overall historical results, i.e., objective measures, cannot really help you. Lets say that you call preflop more than the average winning player. So what? Do you start calling less then? If so, in what situations?

It is all quite silly to think that stats will help you.

Now, lets take the other player. You do care a lot about his historical play as it gives you an indication of what he holds and how he will play. BUT, what do you really know about the other player?

Lets say you are using one of these lameass stat products. It tells you that he raises preflop 30% of the time. Well, that may be a touch useful. But, that stat tells you little about what he is doing at the moment. Now, it would be very useful to know that the player raises 50% of the time in the cutoff when it folds to him and there is a certain player profile seated in button, sb, bb. but, how are you to know this player with this degree of percision? And, even if you did, how would analyze how he is going to play on the flop and beyond in certain situations? And even if you knew that you still have no idea what hands he will play the 50% of the time he raises. If you have 10,000 hands on a player you may at most have a couple of hands from this situation that made it to the showdown. Even then, you are stuck with the deviation in cards dealt. Finally, what if the player varies his play?

What you have is a bit of mess dont you. So, 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.

Certainly, game theory can help you if you have the proper input (which you usually dont). BUT, you are pretty much screwed with game theory if you are talking more than a few players with more than 1 or 2 rounds left. for example, there are 3^169 UTG stategies a player can employ. Now, assume there is only 2 players. There are 3^169 player 2 strategies. Matlab and such can at max calculate a 1000x1000 sparsely populated matrix. The preflop matrix of 3^169 x 3^169, if calculated with the fastest computer in the world starting at the big bang, would be something like .000000000000000000000000000000001% complete by now.

Now, throw into the mix that there are 100,000s of players at a table and you rarely see the same players or have decent hand workups on them.

There is simply no way these little stat programs will hep.

There is a much better way but I will keep the IP protected for now. However, I will answer questions if I can without giving anything away.