River Analysis Software - Making Optimal Bets

[maddog2030]

First off, this is going to be a brain dump about some software I was thinking about writing so bear with me.

Is there any software that given a full community board, your hand, your opponents possible holdings, and your betting/checking/calling predictions, can anaylze the optimal course of action?

For instance, say it's on the river, and you have trips. You put your opponent either on TP or a straight. If you check, you are sure he will bet with either. If you raise his bet, he will only call with his straight. If you bet, he will call with TP and raise with his straight. Obviously bet sizes would be important here to determine profitability of various situations and you would be able to set those. The analyzer would also know there's more possible holdings that give TP than a straight in this situation so it would weigh that accordingly (or you could give more weight to the straight if you're 100% sure he'd play a straight this way up until now, but only 50% sure he would play TP like this up until now).

Given these variables, it should go down your list of possible decisions and determine the highest EV out of all of them.

Perhaps this could even be used on the flop/turn and calculate how many higher EV hands you can get to fold and how many lower EV hands you can get to call your bet without the proper pot odds. These might not be doable since your opponent has much more room to manuver so assuming perfect knowledge of how he will play his hand if you know his cards could be very wrong. On the river though I think you can get a reasonable degree of accuracy.

The other problem with all this is of course complexity... well because poker can be a complex game involving a lot of branching of decisions.

But do you guys think this would be useful in at least a few simple situations, or way too complex to be accurate?

I admit this sounded a lot better in my head than on paper but I've been thinking about if for awhile.

[pyroponic]

Poker is a great game. I really think eliminating the need to develop board and hand reading skills would ruin what I think is the best part of the game, especially when you already have as many advantages you do with Poker Tracker, Playerview, etc. In addition, I think a program like this would be nearly impossible to create.

[maddog2030]

How would this be eliminating any of that? Your read of the situation would be vital input.

And why would it be impossible?