Limit Holdem, what to do?

[Dov]

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If you want to play poker well you'll need to either assimilate an unfeasible amout of tables of data, or assimilate/generate some formulae to make the right decision.

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This is where your problem lies.

You cannot get around the observation part. It is different for every player, and sometimes even for the same player in the same session in different hands.

An extreme example is the guy who has been playing like a rock for the last 3 hours, just got AA, KK, AA back to back and lost huge pots with all 3 of them. He 3 bets the next hand saying well, if I can't win with good cards, I might as well play junk!

What do you think his range is this hand? You have 15,000 hands on him and VPIP / PFR is 15 / 9. Do you really think his stats matter right now?

Your formula will fail here, and you should realize that every hand, there is this element of deviation from stats as good players adjust to the other good players, the bad players, and the image created of them by their run of cards, their table talk, the way they are dressed, their impression of other players, etc.

The game is pretty fluid and you will miss a lot of this nuance trying to play it formula style.

In addition, you will probably find a way to make your formula exploitable just by making it into a formula in the first place, unless you include enough variables to make it adapt to the game.

But that would defeat the whole purpose of the formula b/c it wouldn't be simple enough to be usable anymore. Except for a bot.

That's why I said what I said earlier.

No offense meant.

Hope this makes sense.

[qpw]

It makes sense, but it is, I think, rather throwing the baby out with the bath water.

If you analysed the game of poker in terms of formulae, you could do it, but you would discover that it involved hundreds (if not thousands), and a great many of them interact with one another.

The human brain is rather good at handling situations like this although it usually does it without being cognisant of the details of the formulae involved.

Computers are perfect at handling formulae but, generally, useless at deriving them. Furthermore, programming systems involving many interacting formulae is extremely difficult and error prone (so you can program a computer to fly a plane from London to Beijing but not to serve the in-flight drinks :-)). Which is why, apparantly, the bot operators at the last bot tournament were pulling their hair out as their bots made stupid mistake after stupid mistake.

We all know that you can't realistically reduce poker down to a simple set of formulae, but that doesn't mean you can't try to start off with a few.

After all, "put money in the pot if you think you've got the best hand" is a formula, and it's one I don't doubt a lot of people start off with.