What does hot-and-cold mean?

[mariossoup]

I'm new to poker, and trying to pick up the lingo. What does hot-and-cold mean in a poker context?

For example, in one post AlanBostick wrote "Dealing hot-and-cold against random hands is not the same as actual play against real people."

In another, mdlm wrote "What are you going to do after the preflop play? Go hot and cold?"

Both of these referred to simulations.

[BruceZ]

It means both hands go to the river to determine the winner, irrespective of betting.

[Louie Landale]

Just deal the cards out and see who wins. If you programed your simulated players to never bet, never raise, and never fold, you would get hot-and-cold results for the various hands.

This method is fairly easy to use and give rough approximations on how well hands do against each other. But it has some major drawbacks:

[1] Realistically some hands tend to not get to the river often. Small pairs at holdem are typically discarded after the flop unless they flop a set; thus realistically they lose 2 out of 5 chances to snag a set. The hot-and-cold results would include the turn and river chances, which is unrealistic.

[2] Realistically some hands tend to get to the river often but with marginal prospects, whereas other hands tend to get to the river less often but with excellent prospects. QT may often get to the river when it flops a pair, yet this pair isn't going to win all that often. Thus QT will often invest money in a losing cause. 22 will rarely get to the river but when it flops a set, it will win very often. Even though QT will win more hands than will 22, 22 tends to make more money.

[3] Some hands tend to do very well when played against lots of bad hands (such as what happens in hot-and-cold simulations), whereas other hands tend to do much better against they types of hands players realistically play. Even though 22 is better than AK hot-and-cold, AK does MUCH better against the types of hands other's play, such as AJ and KQ.

Hot-and-cold simulations do well when comparing similar hands (such as 96s and 86s), but does a poor job when comparing dissimilar hands (such as KJ and 86s). Programming computers to play "realistically" just hasn't happened yet, so using simulations to do accurate and realistic hand-comparisons is still in the future.

- Louie