(Crosspost) Vote for new software!

[Sushiglutton]

I made a post earlier ( here ) about a software I thought would help us limit players tremendously in analyzing and improving our game. I e-mailed Poker Academy and they said they may write it IF they thought enough people would buy it. To convince them of that vote here )

Ty

[Aaron W.]

[ QUOTE ]
I made a post earlier ( here ) about a software I thought would help us limit players tremendously in analyzing and improving our game. I e-mailed Poker Academy and they said they may write it IF they thought enough people would buy it. To convince them of that vote here )

Ty

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm going to post this here instead of in the high stakes forum because this is an idea I've tossed around here from time to time over the years.

What you are proposing a number of steps beyond what currently exists. However, I think there's a reasonable "next generation" pokerstove program that I don't think is beyond the current technology.

Pokerstove as a hot-cold analyzer. We give it an initial setup of hole card ranges, dead cards, board cards, or whatever, and then we ask it to deal out the rest of the hands several billion times.

I would really like to see a "next street" analyzer.

The computer would deal out a flop, then compute the equity for each player GIVEN THAT FLOP. Then it would deal another flop and repeat. Given enough flops, the average equity for the individual flops should converge to the hot-cold preflop equity that pokerstove would compute.

HOWEVER, knowing the distribution of equity values would give one a better sense of the postflop value of the preflop hands. As a simplified example, consider the following two cases:

Case 1: You have 50% equity preflop, but half the time your postflop equity is 60% and half the time your postflop equity is 40%. This would be a relatively dicey situation to be in because when you're ahead, you're not ahead by much and when you're behind, you're in a position of essentially being forced to chase the equity.

Case 2: You have 50% equity preflop, but 2/3 of the time your postflop equity is 70% and 1/3 of the time your postflop equity is 10%. This would be an excellent hand to play because when you hit, you hit pretty well and when you miss, you completely miss and it's easy to get away.

The point of such a system would be to analyze the frequency of "good flops" and "bad flops" against the opposing hand ranges. Since most of the value of a hand is developed in postflop play, preflop equity numbers have been treated as a very rough measure of the value of a hand. However, this system would better indicate the postflop elements of play and give a better indication of whether a hand is worth playing.

[Smurph64]

Don't we have some instincts in this case though? I mean those 70/10 scenarios flesh themselves out pretty quickly. Maybe it will help people figure out that playing K10o when the board hits AJxs is not such a good idea.

The value in my mind would be in figuring out bluff opportunities where you can get opponents to fold, if they are thinking with a more complex engine than just what they hold, but since bluff betting requires setups and future cards coming down I am not sure if software can figure out, what equity you need in a pot to bluff from EP on a preflop raised board by the button when it comes down as a 3 flush littles or small/middle pair rainbow.

[Aaron W.]

[ QUOTE ]
Don't we have some instincts in this case though? I mean those 70/10 scenarios flesh themselves out pretty quickly. Maybe it will help people figure out that playing K10o when the board hits AJxs is not such a good idea.

[/ QUOTE ]

When you are only considering narrow ranges, you're right that intuition should be enough. My original idea came out of playing some Stud/8 (where "next street" involves 2-4 cards instead of just one) and in thinking about blind steal/blind defense situations, where hand ranges can be quite broad.

[Sushiglutton]

Glad u like the idea! I think their are many like you who has been thinking about this before. It's a very natural tool to think about when u for instance sit and try to analyze a blind-steal spot. For me I got the idea when I was solving MrWookies homework. Incredibly much work for a very 'simple' river deccission. I thought I learned a lot from the type of analysis, but it was too much work to do it often.

So I really hope enough players will be interested.