Re: Learning to Play Poker
I was getting ready to respond to your other thread, when I noticed you'd entered my thread too. My answer in this thread will come more easily to me than the other, so I'll start with this one and then go to the other. By the way, thanks for your contributions; they harmonize with how I'm proceeding with poker.
Mastery of the mathematics of poker isn't all that hard. In fact, even in those instances where it gets hairy, the consideration is that there is no practical way of proceeding, given nature of the game. It's one thing to bring forward to a particular hand a theoretic conception, and then spend 2 hours making the computations, and quite another to make this a practical thing in a hand that involves many dozens of individual decisions, all of which are done in the course of the one minute that the entire hand requires to play out.
Several outfits have ranked most internet players, keeping a database on all of us. For perhaps $20/month an individual can share this database. Internet casinos resent the unfair advantage that some players have over their fellow players at a table, so they are attempting to figure out countermeasures. Most of these comprise checking your computer to see which applications you're running in the background; if you're using software that's on the prohibited list, the casino might easily enough threaten to bar you from their casino.
Two (or more) persons, living even thousands of miles apart, can conspire to get onto one table, and share hand info, using the telephone and a separate line. Of course these individuals are cheats, in the full sense of the word, and they deserve hanging (as in the Old West!).
Again and again I've found myself in a situation where my mathematics training permitted coming up with a solution, where none seemed apparent. My Graduated Payment Mortgage (GPM) invention was dictated by necessity. In fact, in late 1973 I used a GPM to buy my present home, and a year later I bought 1,700 apartments in Dallas; the GPM is the 5th dimension of finance, and broke the Gordian Knot that precluded so many real properties from selling. The GPM permitted sharing future benefits of ownership with the seller; the wise buyer required a significantly lower initial payment on debt financing as the tradeoff.
There are applications that I can envision, whereby I can secure advantage in poker, using applied mathematics. I haven't done it, but intend to. After all, I'm still playing 1/2 cents NL HE, which I intend to do until such time as I honestly feel that I have positive expectation of winning, when I sit down to play poker!
Just today I thanked Pov for his linkage to a free site that does more than PokerStove does (another free poker site). In fact, the linkage was published just today, so I suggest you search messages I've put onto 2+2 for today, using the author search capability of 2+2. It was Pov too who published a table of hand expectancies for every one of the 169 possible hands, and for tables with 2 (head-to-head), 3, 4, etc thru 10 players at the table. Pov did this in another of my threads. I wish you well, if you're hunting for it! But it was done early on, and I have only 360 threads on 2+2 so far. I think Pov's table was prepared using PokerStove (and applying lots of elbow greece!).
Hope this helps!
Dave
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