FireGoblin

I started using the trial version of monker solver to do my own sims and have a questions about the "Keep avg strategy on (streets)" option. Most things I've heard indicate that you need to solve each street individually and you should just keep that at 1 and resolve the next streets. This makes sense from the perspective of being very accurate, but looking at the river solutions for some turn sims it seems like they're reasonable solutions and may be significantly better than nothing if can't run every river solution on its own. Is this the case that they're useful but just not pro level, or are they always very far from the solution?

Side question: Is there any scripted way to tell monker just to run all the river simulations without having to input the all those boards in the scripting field?

I've been playing around with Pokersnowie and wanted to give my first impressions after looking through some hands with it and having heard people saying its a tool that will teach you everything and the end of poker (obviously some nl hold'em specialists there).  I'm hoping to inspire some more level headed discussion of its strengths and weaknesses.  It is a fascinating tool for seeing game theory and the power of computers applied to nl hold'em.  It does strictly follow game theory in that there are lots of spots it considers break even between two options, and if it thinks one line is even .01 ev higher than the other it will always take the higher ev line. It certainly can be a powerful learning tool to analyze one's own game and the game as a whole.  

As for the restrictions on it I think they have varying effects.  The bet size restrictions of .5, 1, 2 times pot or all-in are certainly real limitations, but probably not a huge detriment.  That said, it would be interesting if in the future they re-release with a 3/4 bet option.  Could see whether one of our favorite bet sizes has real reason to be the favorite, or its just another options and we should be varying our bet sizes more.  The one annoying thing is that I believe Pokersnowie linearly interpolates the ev between the sizes if a human chooses a different one, so it will almost always interpret your sizing as inferior ev.  The inability to use two different sizes on one street actually seems like the worst limitation, though a limitation a lot of human players have in their game for simplicity reasons too.

However, I think one has to be very careful applying it to real play, as the level of precision a computer can pull off makes it play very differently sometimes from human players.  Have seen many cases where a call and raise are considered equivalent, but raise is recommended 97% of the time.  There is a good chance in real life whatever is causing raise to be the normal play makes it the clearly more profitable play and calling inferior, and just in general it gives you no advice on which way to go when in real life there is rarely if ever a truly neutral ev decision.  I also would expect because they are near GTO play, blockers play a much higher role than in human play since knowing your actual two cards allows you to shift the weights of hands in the opponents hand lets you make very marginal decisions based on that shift that are too fine-grained for humans.

If you look at the Preflop Advisor it has lots of unusual raises going on.  It recommends playing a lot more trouble hands (ATo,KJo utg) from early position.  I'm thinking that part of it is the 2.25 bb raises pre-flop which would mean it should raise more often.  However, I think the biggest issue is that being a incredibly precise computer it is perfectly comfortable throwing in donk bets and has fine-tuned its check-call game, two elements (especially the later) that are still some of the most difficult spots for humans to get right.  Because of this it is not as afraid of playing weak hands OOP.  You also may find those weak trouble hands are very marginally profitable such that any mistakes with them (something a human is bound to do, especially oop) would turn them into a losing hand.  It also seems to like AXs a lot more raising it from any position and low suited connectors a lot less (maybe a combination of less implied odds from a computer, negative blockers, and because everybody is playing a lot of AXs you wind up being over-flushed more often). 

I think there is a lot to learn from studying Pokersnowie, but at the same time trying to follow everything it does without adapting it to your human limitations and the limitations of your opponents could be disastrous.  Simply put, playing poker in the walking a razor's edge world of Pokersnowie vs Pokersnowie and playing with humans who don't have perfect RNGs, don't have perfect recall of all situations to make same decision every time, make mistakes both systematic and random, and adapt to exploit other players is a very different game.

I've been playing around with pokersnowie checking it out.  In another post I want to give my first thoughts on pokersnowie.  However first I think I found one instance where it is actually playing sub-optimal even by its own limitations (.5,1,2 pot and all in bets only.  Can also only choose one bet size for its bets in a certain situation).  Wanting to confirm this is an error or find out why I'm wrong.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

if you need to download the program: www.pokersnowie.com

Instructions to view error (assumes you have the pokersnowie demo or full version open)

1. Click import on top bar

2.  Select sample and click 'view analysis'

3.  Click blunders

4.  Click the forward button above hand history till at blunder 2 (hand 4906512470)

5.  There should now be a $230 bet by Ad5d vs 9c9s into $400 pot on a Ks3s2d pot.

6.  Note that pokersnowie considers the 99 an error to call and an even bigger error to all-in.

7.  Click analysis tools

8.  Click view ranges.  Note the hero's range is QQ-55 and AQ, and that fold is the main choice.

9.  Close range advice

10.  Select the "Player-_-4 bets $230" spot in the hand history.

11. Click view ranges.

12. Select "Bet 1/2 POT 27.05%" and then Suggested action.

13.  Note that he is betting KK and a lot of high card hands (18.88% KK, 81.12% other).

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Analysis:

First of all you should ignore the Ad5d in Player 4's hand.  It is not a hand pokersnowie recommends 4-betting pre-flop in this situation.  What we are concerned with is the how it plays the ranges it recommends to have gotten to this point in the hand.  

Its recommended betting range for player 4 is super polarized to being about 19% top set kings, and 81% being no pair bluffs.  This could easily be exploited by hero shoving his entire range (which none of player 4's bluff bets have equity to call) of 55-QQ,AQ over the 1/2 pot bet.  This is solely a protection raise as the only hand calling is KK which crushes every hand in his range, but because the bettor has so heavily weighted his hand towards bluffs simply shoving and taking down the pot 81% of the time becomes very profitable since the shove only needs to succeed  832.75/1462.75 = 56.9% of the time.  Whether or not calling with some of the range would be even more profitable cannot be confirmed (though tend to think its unlikely and would require player 4 to continue bluffing too much on future streets), but shoving all of hero's hands would be within the restrictions of pokersnowie's system and would be more profitable than the recommended fold.

So if this is correct Pokersnowie is not perfectly optimal even within the restrictions upon it.  I cannot say for sure whether it is a flaw in the neural network system that makes play adjustments or that even with the mass training it has done that dealer raise, sb 3 bet, bb 4 bet, sb calls, flop similar to Ks3s2d just doesn't come up often enough for this specific situation to be well trained.   I also do not know if this is an isolated case, or if there are mistakes hidden about in pokersnowie's play.