In memory of Gary Carson

In early March poker author Gary Carson passed away.  I didn’t know him personally, but his impact on my thinking about how I approached the game of poker was profound.  I’m very sad to learn that he’ll never write another brilliant poker book.  To adequately explain to a non-poker player what Gary Carson did, I…

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Factors that make limit poker games entirely uninteresting

I've played limit poker ($3/$6, $6/$12, and $9/18) at all the Bay Area casinos.  They all run their rooms slightly differently.  I've felt that the games at Bay 101 are the most lucrative, with Garden City being slightly less profitable, and Lucky Chances and Artichoke Joe's being the least profitable. Over the last few years…

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Vegas trip report, October 2009

Though I live near card rooms in the Bay area, I like to go to Vegas occasionally as a sort of personal poker camp.  The time purely devoted to poker allows me to experiment with my game in a way that leads to deep analysis for a prolonged period of time.  Also with someone along…

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Playing pairs in Limit Texas Hold’em

I caught a cold over the weekend and had just about enough energy to lay in bed, but not to get up.  (Not entirely true, since on day one of the cold I painted four rooms of the house, but that's probably why I was bed-ridden the next two days…) While laid up in bed…

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What’s it like to play a third of all the hands dealt to you?

Let me tell you, it's a lot of fun.  You're like a giant suckout machine, and people constantly curse you for being a donkey.  I'm experimenting with a new starting Limit Hold'em hand set I created using pokerstove for a style I've named "Drunken Master".  Chris and Katie are familiar with this style, it's a…

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I continue to improve against Sparbot

At my coach's urging, I have been playing heads up battles against University of Alberta poker bot, Sparbot.  It's the dumbest of their algorithms, playing a heads up hold'em game that's perfectly balanced without taking into account any opponent tendencies.  I'm playing it with it's configurable parameter set to "passive". When I say "balanced", I…

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Combinatorics in Texas Hold’em Limit Poker

Combinatorics is the mathematical technique of enumerating and analyzing combinations of objects.  If you've ever had a pair of pocket Aces preflop and had an opponent bet his whole stack against you, you did a form of this analysis in your head.  Presumably your reasoning went something like this:"I have the best hand.  Any two…

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Heads Up Poker Hand Selection

So for my Internet poker practice I’ve been almost exclusively playing heads up limit Texas Hold’em lately.   I don’t claim to be particularly good at it yet.  I’ve written before about my efforts to beat sparbot, an AI that plays a perfectly balanced game theory variant of Hold’em, but playing a real people online is…

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Poker coaching

So at the beginning of September 2008 I asked a poker player who had never coached before to be my coach.  The rate we agreed upon is in line with what I've seen others coaching, in fact a little less.  Since he's never coached before, we sort of made it up as we went along.…

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Poker homework: what hands beat you?

So my coach and I were talking about some different ways of doing board analysis, and he suggested I compute "the hands that beat me" on every street.  Getting significantly better at board analysis is important as I move up limits from the microstakes I've been playing.  While I'll continue to use poker bonuses on…

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