[karlson]

Tim,

I think you are forgetting just how much things are simplified by the cards being face up.

To answer your first question, my point was about "perfect" play, assuming your opponent also plays perfectly. The program is something I wrote myself, it enumerates all combination, and, for now, only works for heads up (I don't think that the effort required to make it work multiway is justified. I have used the damn thing exactly twice since writing it.)

So you want to put in opponent modeling. Great. But the cards are face-up! So what kinds of things do you know?

a) He will go to the river with AA every time regardless of your cards/flop? Ok, easy to add in to calculations.
b) (Multiway) He will not raise to knock out other hands even when he should? Ok, again, fairly easy to calculate in.

I did do some calculations, and you are right, for 10-handed, the complexity gets slightly out of hand. (For heads up, my program runs in a few seconds.) I don't see how MC would be particularly helpful in this case. The random boards are not the dominant term.

I still don't see why this is particularly useful...If someone points out to me why it is, then maybe we can do something to reduce the complexity (it seems like the tree should be very suitable for significant pruning).