Posts Tagged ‘poker’
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…
Read MoreMy first 5,000 hand experiment
So to recap, as I work on improving my Limit Texas Hold'em game, I concocted an experiment with my coach. I used my calculations of each possible preflop hand against tables containing one to nine opponents each. I then built a very solid preflop strategy, taking into account position and opponents, and set out to…
Read MoreProfit by position: What would you pay to be psychic in poker?
So for several weeks I've been doing an experiment that Andrew and I came up with. I ran the math on all limit hold'em hands, and then constructed a set that I thought were playable for one bet, and another set playable for two bets. With a roughly repeatable preflop and postflop strategy, I set…
Read MoreI 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…
Read MoreCombinatorics 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…
Read MoreHeads 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…
Read MorePoker results for 2008 (last 5 years)
So after booking a big win playing live poker in 2007, I looked forward to making even more money by moving up stakes in 2008. I didn’t really move up in stakes, and played live for the first half of the year until through a combination of losing at the tables and the need to…
Read MoreStrategies and tactics of heads up poker
My ongoing heads up battle against Sparbot, the Univ. of Alberta poker model Though it doesn’t happen very often in a cash games, heads up poker (just you and one opponent) is the gauntlet you have to master to win any poker tournament. It’s actually a good exercise for the rest of your poker career…
Read MorePoker 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.…
Read MorePoker and parenting, right now.
First, a new baby: And now, a screen shot of a $0.25/$0.50 LIMIT Texas Hold'em game I was in this weekend online. Look carefully at the player in seat 3. He's sitting on a stack of $10,000+ chips. Now he can't possibly lose it all at once, but I found this hilarious. He sat down…
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