[SavannahSlim]

Okay, I’ll admit it. I used Winholdem for a week. After seven days of 12-hour holdem-fests, I am pleased to say I came out a winner. I’ll tell you how much a winner later.

First, some background. I am a database manager with a college education and years of electronics and programming experience. I’ve always fancied myself a good poker player, although I tend to win more in home games with people I know than in card-club games with strangers. I noticed Texas holdem tables in Las Vegas, but I never sat down there, since I didn’t know how to play the game, and I’d learned back in my Navy days that poker lessons are always very expensive.

Four months ago I happened upon a texas holdem website that had, among its other features, a “free play” option. Now this was the ticket, I thought. I could learn how to play holdem and it wouldn’t cost me a dime.

I found that I liked the game. I could learn to love this game. My initial 1,500 free credits were gone in less than two hours. Well, I figured, people play differently when there’s no real money on the line. What would it hurt to buy in with, say, a hundred bucks, and sample what really happens?

Three months and $4,000 later, I was furious. “Am I that stupid?” I said. “Maybe so,” I answered. So I bought every book I could find on texas holdem. I read them. I took notes. I gave myself quizzes. After two weeks of nonstop study, I bought $500 on a holdem website and started playing. Three weeks later, I was into the game for $3,000.

Infuriated, I started researching holdem on the web and noticed some mentions of a program called “Winholdem.” I found the Winholdem website and downloaded the demo. The program uses a “screen-scraping” routine that “looks” at your texas holdem table and “reads” what’s there. It’s pretty good at seeing where you’re sitting, what your cards are, and what the bet is. It then uses that information to calculate your odds of winning.

Right out of the box, Winholdem is not a gambler’s (or cheater’s, if you prefer) dream. You have to enter in which hands you want to call, which hands you wan to raise, and which hands you want to go all-in with (for no-limit games). There are formula dialogs (it uses C syntax and symbols, so if you’re not a programmer, prepare to learn the basics of C) where you can tweak Winholdem evaluation strategy—and believe me, you must tweak it. For instance, Winholdem has no strategy or programmable variable based on position relative to the dealer—a huge deficit, to my way of thinking. It does have a variable called “betposition” which I erroneously assumed was my position relative to the dealer, but no, it is your position in the betting, e.g., if you are in position 8 relative to the dealer, but everyone ahead of you folded, your betposition is 1.

One quick aside here: There’s a feature in the top-end version of Winholdem that I found revolting when I actually took the time to read about it. This is the “team” feature. The team feature is nothing short of a collusion tool. Using “channels” you can link to any number of your buddies sitting at the same table and share your cards. I can think of absolutely no legitimate reason for the team feature, and as a further aside, I would recommend that online casinos prosecute any players they find using the team feature to the fullest extent possible. Including visiting them teamers and talking to them with a baseball bat.

It sees your pocket cards and gives you a variety of information on the game as it plays. For instance, you have QJo. It tells you the rank of that pocket (33) against the 169 possibilities. Projects that hand out 100 thousand games and tells you what the likelihood to win, tie, or lose with that hand. It recommends your next action, i.e., fold/check, call, raise. It will even play for you, all you have to do is click the auto-play button. Pretty nifty.

Watching it “autoplay,” I learned that it is easily stolen from. In fact, while I couldn’t complain about its initial evaluations of hole cards, its actual game play was awful. I watched it give up blind after blind to a raiser on the button. And if you don’t think that’s all that bad, calculate out what four or five big and small blinds per hour are. Take that much out of your pocket and dump it in the crapper. Repeat every hour. Yeah. Not pretty is it? I thought so.

So after endlessly tweaking Winholdem, and then watching it merrily piss my money away, I decided its only real usefulness was as a sort of coach. So I turned off the autoplay feature and let it watch and comment while I played. I followed its recommendations, and—after 12 hours of non-stop play I had turned two hundred dollars into (ready for this) two hundred and thirty-four dollars and fifty cents. It’s been a while since I worked in the food service industry, but I believe the kid who supersized my fried last Friday makes better than that for a regular 8-hour shift.

So, what have I learned? Well, number one, if you buy Winholdem thinking you can crank up your computer and let it win the rent for you while you go shopping, think again. To merely get the program to the point where it doesn’t make really stupid mistakes requires hours of writing evaluation statements in C, then testing them. To win requires better programming skills and sharper poker playing ability than I possess. To give Winholdem money to bet with and then walking away is as doomed to failure as letting your dog balance your checkbook.

The bottom line is this: I bought Winholdem thinking I could use it to become a better holdem player—and I have, in that I have finally gotten over the attachment to mediocre hands that just could very possibly win this big pot if I just get lucky please lord just this once. But I already had plenty of good advice from the masters of the game concerning tilting and mediocre hands. All I had to do was heed that advice. Instead, I bought a two-hundred-dollar hole-card evaluation program that was a bigger loser than I was.