Card Player Skills Trainer

Texas Hold’em Experts offer various strategies for adjusting your play according to table position, unlike hand ranking which can be readily determined mathematically, position strategies are a bit more of a black art.  I was curious to see just what effect position may have on your outcome.  I extracted winner table position statistics from 270,000 hand histories. Only pot winner’s positions were noted,  return on pot investment data was not available. Read more…

Texas Hold'em Poker Add new tag, statistical curiosity

A number of on line odds calculators, as well as the starting hand exercise holsted here predict winning odds based strictly on mathematical ranking of card combinations.  Curious to see how well real world hand choices coincide to the odd calculator recommendations, I generated a winning hand stats chart based on real game history data.

Utilizing game history data from about 1/4 million IRC “no robot holdem” hands played by a couple thousand players from 1988 to 2000, to create a chart comparably to statistically generated tables.  Some issues:

• Winning and tied hands are combined here (it’s more work to separate ties)
• Some data skewing may result from the exclusion of foldout wins in which the hole cards aren’t revealed.
• The size of the sampled tables varied, probably more weak winners sneaked in from small tables.

Perhaps the most interest, but not surprising difference between the theoretical and real world hand choices, is the lower success of junk hands (those ranked below 36 of 169) of real world players (in Red). This no doubt is due to lousy hands being folded well before the river, while the calculated odds (in Blue) assume all hands are played to the end.

The complete comparison table is shown below Read more…

Texas Hold'em Poker statistical curiosity

This drill exercise experiment is intended to improve preflop hand evaluation skills, for those who are not that good at memorizing tables of data, this module provides some start hand reading experience, hopefully faster than just playing a bunch of games. Play strategy tips for each specific combination have been included.

Check out the Start Hand Drill module.

This unit uses precomputed statistics collected in about 4 million hand simulations (monte carlo). Exact odds calculation techniques not relying on repeated “rolls of the dice” have been devised, one uses a pre-calculated intermediate table that a computer spent a month calculating.

Focusing on the top 60 of the 169 different unique combinations, the deals look like you have the most friendly dealer in town. These 60 combinations all have a better than 10% chance of winning the hand. These top combinations come up 26% of the time, suggesting folding 74% of the time may be part of a winning strategy.  Suite variations cause these 60 combinations to come up in about 345 different hands out of the 1326 possible 2 card combinations.

You may also want to try the newer “Cross Cards” Hand Recognition Exercise, using a crossword game like format to test your eye’s card combination finding abilities.

Texas Hold'em Poker starting hand strategy, training module

Finally found time to fiddle with an interactive trainer idea.

Flop-Turn-River Odds Exercise

Attempting to address an issue that deserves a bit more attention, this one shows the winning card odds in graphical form, based strictly on what is displayed on the flop-turn-river. Too often one focuses on how these cards add to the value of your hole cards, while it’s equally important to project what hands your opponents may end up with.

Check “Guess the odds” to bring up a quiz stage at the river, you click on the graph to show your estimate of the odds. The error scoring is a simple total of percentage mis-matches. This trial version has a small fixed pre-calculated data set, for a 10 player table. These stats don’t take into considerations player folds before the river, showing the likely best hands, should all hands play out.

Sorry, no odds calculation tips are given here, the module should still be useful for those less mathematically inclined, who play by the seat of their pants, this sort of exercise may speed the development of an intuitive sense for the odds based on experience.

Any comments would be greatly appreciated…

Your suggestions and feedback will help shape the future, refined version of this application.

The other experimental exercises:

Pre-flop hand strength ranking exercise. Do you remember your starting hand tables.

Simple Hand Recognition Exercise Cross-Cards.  A laid back eye test of sorts.

Texas Hold'em Poker Poker drill, Texas Holdem, Training

Those holdout Macintosh users, still using a Mac perhaps for it’s relative immunity to internet viruses, might be interested in these quality poker programs available for the Mac.

Poker Academy Pro, the Texas Hold’em version comes in a Mac version.

This program, using artificial intelligence, offers challenging robot opponents who adapt to your playing style.  Here’s a chance to advance you skills,  playing tough opponents without burning down your bank.

Read more…

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