Poker Recommender

Hey all,

I decided today to release a program I wrote for my dad back in June. The name of the program is PokerRecommender and works only with party skins, let me give you a little background information first. My dad is bad at poker...really bad. He's played for about 2 years and still can't beat 2/4 consistantly online, and it is so frustrating to sit and watch him, give him advice, and have him do the exact opposite. Case in point: I've told him literally 5+ times to flat out fold QJo early position, in fact one time I saw him limp in again in that situation, yelled at him not to, he gave me the standard "Really? Fold a queen-jack?? Wow...ok", then I went to the bathroom, 5 minutes later I came back and he was in early position with QJ and playing the flop.

At this point I realized that he needed a more persistant guide on how to play preflop. So with a little GUI help from my friend, and a lot of boring hours of testing, PokerRecommender was born.

You can see a picture here: http://filebox.vt.edu/users/tansey/PokerRecommender.jpg

And download it here: http://filebox.vt.edu/users/tansey/PokerRecomender.zip

Installation: unzip the file whereever you would like, when it first starts up the program will ask you to point to your poker directory. This is actually the images directory, so if you play on party it'd be partypoker/images that you want to point it to, not just partypoker. If you do by accident point it to the partypoker folder, you'll need to copy all the files in the image folder to the partypoker folder (I know cause I did it on my new computer, lol). Then just start up a table, sit down, and go to File->attach history, and find the correct hand history. From there it'll do the rest. Note that you're free to run as many instances of this as possible, so if you play multiple tables you can have 1 for each table if you really want.

Remember this program is aimed at amateur or poor limit, full-ring players playing on partyskins.

recdefs.rec: This is the recommendations file. I'm going to describe how it all works in the hopes that someone will develop a better set of recommendations than I have. While mine are by no means horrible, they're probably a little weak tight, and were written in a pinch.

PokerRecommender bases its judgements on 5 criteria:
1. Betting level (BETS): this is the highest betting level the round is currently at (i.e. all preflop betting starts at 1 because of the big blind and can go up to 4 which represents capped bets)
2. Bets to Call (BTC): this is the betting level - how many bets you've put in. So if you raise UTG and the button reraises, the blinds fold and it's back to you. Now the BETS level is 3 and your BTC is 1.
3. Position (POSITION): your position, either EARLY, MIDDLE, LATE, SMALLBLIND, or BIGBLIND
4. Pot type (POT): this is type of pot you're going to have on the flop, either NONE (everyone has folded to you), SHORTHANDED (less than 3 people total), NORMAL (3 players), MULTIWAY (more than 3 players). Note that this calculation does not include blinds preflop but does include you.
5. Hand (HAND): Your actual hand, where you can simply say HAND AK and it will match all hands that are AK. You can also say AKs meaning AK-suited; simply AK implies AKo if an AKs definition exists, or all AK if no AKs definition exists.

After you specify a situation you can provide a reasoning statement with REASON. Then you state your action with ACTION and CALL, FOLD, or RAISE.

There is also a special word, ALL which applies to all 5 situational items (though I don't recommend using it for HAND). Note that at the start, all 5 specifiers are set to ALL and that no strategies are added until the script hits ACTION. Once that happens, the current 5 settings are saved along with the action and reasoning that corresponds to them. The 5 settings will remain as they are however, so if you have 2 similar situations that differ only in the fact that you play them differently if one is short handed and the other is multiway (example: AJ, late position, everyone has limped vs AJ, late position, everyone has folded) then all you have to do is state the initial set and then set your action, on the next line your variables are still saved so just change the POT variable to NONE and declare your new REASON and ACTION.


If you guys have any thoughts/comments about it I'd love to hear. I know of a few people that this program has helped (my dad included) to go from losing to break even or break even to winning at low limit (2/4). If I can help anyone else get a little better then I'm more than happy to.

Thanks,
--Loose