"What decision do I make now?" : Math will not get you there

[Cyrus]

I'm reposting here the arguments made by Utah, in another forum of this website and on an unrelated subject originally. I'm not sure what Utah is trying to say exactly except that he -and his poker team- are after optimal play in each and every situation, irrespective of past results. And aren't we all? But I wish Utah would elaborate a bit, because which data exactly matter in his analysis and which data don't is not too clear.

Here is Utah, in own words, paraphrased only in one or two points in order to eliminate some irrelevant topical matters from the original thread.

I don't know how to measure results objectively. How does one do that? In reality, it is next to impossible to truly do [that] with anything of any complexity.

[Poker Tracker and StatKing] do nothing for the player and they will not help you improve your game. I created a much better tool that takes a completely different approach.

Let's take a simple stat - preflop aggressiveness. Let's say that I raised preflop 20% of the time. Is that good or bad? Which situations did I raise when I shouldn't have? When didn't I raise when I should have? You can't get the answers from such a stupid stat. Worse, you can't get the answers even if I provided a ton more info. It is the wrong approach.

Again, this isn't me just mouthing off on a silly message board. My team has something like 20,000 hours working on this very problem. Of course, our approach works precisely because it doesn't relay on measuring your game objectively. In fact, we don't care about the user's past play and we don't provide any of the b.s. historical product features - eg., hand playback, hand downloads, comparison charts, etc. They are not needed for a player to slaughter a table.

Mathematics will absolutely not get you there. We tried in our original effort and it failed miserably.

The question of winning or losing is never asked as it is an unimportant question. The program does not track winning/losing. The program simply cares about one thing - what decision do I make now? It is all about specificity. Certain things happened before the action came to me, certain things will happen based on whatever action I take, and now I'm holding specific cards. That is all I care about. At the moment of decision I couldn't care less about my historical results as they mean nothing (other than how other players perceive me). Knowing I historically raised 20% preflop means nothings. The fact that I am a winning or losing player means nothing. The knowledge is not actionable. I have a decision to make and all I care about is making the best decision at that moment. Everything that doesn't help me make that decision is just worthless noise.

You just can't measure things objectively and even if you could it is usually of little value. This doesn't mean that results never matter. Rather, it is a softer fuzzier analysis.

It is easy to talk about objective measures in poker but people can't back up the argument with even an objective review of a simple problem. That is the folly of "objective measures".