Crazy Eddie's 10,000-hand Chinese Poker w/2-7 Sale!

[MarkGritter]

You can download ten thousand well-set* hands of Chinese Poker with 2-7 in the middle** for free*** here: http://lowballgurus.com/cp27/cp27-10000-hands.txt

This file is about 372KB large. Each hand shows the back, middle, and front settings (in that order) and the expected value**** against an opponent who is playing a similarly-strong strategy.

* Approximately 2% of hands have an alternate setting that may be better against a maximally-exploitive counterstrategy. The file http://lowballgurus.com/cp27/cp27-10000-hands-2.txt includes approximately the same set of 10,000 hands, alternately set.
** Using a 2-4 point scoring system without tiebreakers or natural hands.
*** Cost of internet connection and storage not included. Offer void where prohibited.
**** Standard error of expected value is about +/- 0.02 points. 5% of hands may have "true" expected values outside this range.

So... I've received a couple requests about whether I can make my entire data set available, or provide a program which can calculate a good setting for arbitrary hands. Unfortunately the 10M-hand file is, well, one thousand times as large as the file above. 375MB downloads are a bit more than I'm interested in hosting at the moment. Any program would be of a similar size. (And to be honest I'm not all that interested in doing the necessary Windows development to make it broadly useful; my tool runs under Linux.)

It would be feasible to run a CP2-7 hand calculator as a web service, just not on my current hosting. I figure it would cost $60-$100/month to keep it running, but believe that there is insufficient interest to provide that level of income (whether through ads, sponsorships, subscriptions, per-hand costs, etc.) Perhaps the most likely method of extracting value would be to collect money for not offering this service, from players who are currently beating the CP games. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

It would be possible to accept hands via a web form or email, batch them up periodically for evaluation, and post the results publicly... but that's not really a service I'm interested in maintaining long-term, any more than I'm willing to burn CDs and ship them out. So, while I'm open to providing more access to my CP2-7 results, I don't see a way that's feasible for me to take on as a project.

(P.S. I just wanted to geek out for a moment about the cost possibilities here. Most coaching services charge you a per-hour rate; you have to decide for yourself whether you're getting advice that's worth what you're paying. But a CP2-7 coaching service could provide a much more precise quantification of how good the "advice" is. The cost for evaluating a hand could be related to the difference in EV between how you would set the hand, and the best setting!)