Welcome

Even though Howard beat me to it, this will be our newest forum. It's purpose is to discuss, review, and comment on books and software, and all gambling books and software, not just poker, can be included.


I have recently finished some projects and will be getting back to reading poker/gambling books again and will post reviews as I finish each book. I should have a review up of Serious Poker by Dan Kimberg in the near future.


Also, we have a link (see our Favorite Links page) to some really excellent book reviews by Nick Christenson. Hopefully he'll participate here as well.

I am wondering if anyone has any thoughts about the couple of different software programs available for research. I have been looking at both the Wilson software, adn the AceSpade Software.


If you have any thoughts on either of these products, or poker software in general I would appreciate it.


Thank you


Joe

To answer your question, I would be very reluctant to use any of these softwares for research. The reason is that you don't have access to the programming code and don't really know what errors it may be making.


Furthermore, at each step of the decision tree additional error may be added so that the final result might be significantly off. So in this sense, even though I have always been critical of conclusions based on hot and cold simulations, it's probably better to use them since at least in this case you know what it is you are getting. Just understand that this is a very poor model (especially in hold 'em, but not as much in stud where it is frequently right to chase) for many poker situations.

Well, while you're on the subject of possible problems with poker software, I was wondering how these programs handle shuffling a deck of cards. Since there are several ways to go about setting up a shuffling routine (depending on how well you want to mimic an actual shuffle), and there is also the problem of not enough seed values, I was wondering if there was a good way to ensure that the deck is random without having to have 52! possible seed values?


If there's a site you know of which discusses this, I'd appreciate the link, as well as any comments from anyone who knows how this is done.

Paradise has good pages talking about how they handle shuffling and random number generation at
http://www.paradisepoker.com/shuffling.html
and
http://www.paradisepoker.com/rng.html
respectively. I'm not sure that they completely answer your question, but if you find this topic interesting, they are good reading.

No one ever answered Joe's original question.


I realize (as Mason says) that there are limitations to any poker program, but I, too, am thinking about buying one for Hold'em and would appreciate it if anyone could share their thoughts about the relative merits of the Wilson and the AceSpade products.


Thanks.