Poki Poker advice/info

[william deangelis]

Is this program worth buying? Also, I am in the Navy and tend to go out to sea for weeks at a time with no way of playing online. I can spend my off time using this program. Right now I am holding my own in $1/$2 6 max but dont really consider myself much more than a serious beginner.
Thanks

[jtr]

Hi, William.

I don't know how much they are asking for the Poki program, but I used to play earlier versions of it back when it was available on their web site for free. It certainly puts up a good game, and if you learn to hold your own against it then playing humans should be easy.

As you might expect, the Poki style is both fearless and tricky, so it's probably best as training for mid-limits. If you find a style to beat it, that's probably not going to be the right way to play 4/8 against typical B&M players, for example.

Best of luck with your decision.

[Mammux]

I just got Poki and I really like it.

-Magnus

[turnipmonster]

IMO poki is really best for developing heads up strategies.

--turnipmonster

[Vulpine]

Turbo Texas Hold’em (TTH) and Poki’s Poker Academy (PPA) seem to me to be more realistic than playing online for play money but both are tighter than most low limit games. Both of them allow you to zip through the starting hands that you drop which I find to be useful for training and for warming up before playing for real. Unlike TTH, PPA can be configured to deal you only the top 25% of hands which allows you to focus on how to play on the flop and beyond but I wouldn’t want to get too use to this. PPA’s bots seem to have more of a theoretical basis behind them and they seem to me to be more realistic than TTH's bots but that’s just a subjective impression.

I like to watch the value for hand strength in PPA to see how well I’m doing at judging this on my own. PPA’s hand strength is the probability of your hand being the best hand at the moment given that your opponents have played any starting hand. You can also load your current hand and the board as well as the number of opponents and run a Monte Carlo simulation to determine the probability of your hand resulting in a win, or a tie or loss at show down. You learn to adjust for the fact the simulation assumes that the opponents will play any starting hand. This is done so as not make any assumptions about playing styles. The simulation facility helps you to test how well you read the board especially testing your ability to detect “death cards” and your ability to account for all possible draws even the ones that are highly unlikely. Although it’s determined in a different manner, similar information can be found in PPA’s assessment of the positive and negative potential of a hand. These values are displayed along with the hand strength to the right of the virtual table. (Note that there's currently a bug in the hand evaluator for determining hand strength; use the hand strength on the pane beside the virtual table.)

I find the ad-hoc Monte Carlo Simulation facility in PPA to be useful for numerous things. For example, you can use PPA to see if the relative ranking of various types of flops recommended by an author are valid. Sometimes you’ll be surprised by what you find from these sorts of investigations. Another example is comparing Skalansky & Malmuth’s relative ranking of starting hands with the rankings that you get with them while heads up. This kind of exercise makes some of their insights about non multi-way pots more concrete. I’ve used this facility for numerous other investigations as a way to get a somewhat scientific confirmation on various insights and recommendations.

The one thing that I miss in PPA over TTH is that TTH’s Odds option is great way to test myself to see if I’m missing any draws and to see how well I’m doing at calculating the odds against making those draws. TTH also has an add-on facility called “Side Show Sid” that will review your play and indicate where Sid would have played differently than you. I have ambivalent feelings about Sid who displays his views in text on the screen as well as voicing them through a speaker. Sid takes a long time to run on my somewhat dated laptop. Moreover, Sid seems to me to use a rules-based approach instead of basing its decisions on the basis of positive or negative expected value like that done in “Small Stakes Texas Hold’em.” See Two Plus Two Publishing.

You can download the demo versions of PPA and TTH to help you decide. I’d be sure to check out the link to “The Challenge of Poker” published in the Artificial Intelligence Journal to help make my decision. See http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~darse/Papers/AIJ02.html. Both would be useful when you’re at sea. If you're forced to choose between the two, your best option would depend on exactly what you're looking for. On practical basis, TTH has a grater capacity to test your ability to see all your outs while PPA’s has a greater capacity to test your ability to measure your current hand strength. PPA looks a little better because it’s a 32 bit windows application while TTH appears to run under Windows XP's 16 bit simulator.