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

[XxGodJrxX]

This looks like it is against Party's TOS to me. If it isn't, then it should be. This is no different than running a bot to play for you.

It may be against their TOS, to be honest I don't really know, the software is offered as-is with no guarantees or assurances. It is different from a bot however, as it doesn't play the full hand for you. If anything I would compare it to the excel spreadsheet for starting hands that is very popular...especially since that's exactly what I designed it based upon. It's really more like a quick, accurate search engine through Sklansky than a bot that does all the work for you. My dad has used it for several months and no one from party has said anything.

[Sniper]

[ QUOTE ]
This looks like it is against Party's TOS to me. If it isn't, then it should be. This is no different than running a bot to play for you

[/ QUOTE ]

To date, Poker Advice software that doesn't actually push the buttons for you has not been deemed against the T&C of any poker site... its considered to be the same as having a chart in front of you!

I like the idea very much. I would need this for my wife.
but the download didnt work for me. could anyone please tell me it worked for someone?

thanx

Sorry for the broken link everyone. I was moving some files around last night and accidently misplaced the .zip file. It should be fixed now.

--Loose

I'd just like to reiterate one point in the first post. I'm really hoping that you guys will tweak the recommendations file and post it publicly, as the current one is a little weak tight. Over 2000 hands it's about 14% vpip and 7% pfr, but I've noticed more than 1 situation when testing it myself or watching others play where it will say fold and I would have raised.

If you find any issues like this, please either fix them or post the hand history (with the corresponding recommendations) so that I can fix it.

Thanks,
--Loose

hi loose

thanx for bringin back the file . I installed it, but after attaching the table, poker recommender is not responding.
how can I uninstall it, and try it again from scratch?

does anybody have any proof whatsoever that this isnt a trojan?

not that i'm accusing you, but if you are clever enough to write this program, you are clever enough to write a trojan that would go undetected.

[ QUOTE ]
if you are clever enough to write this program, you are clever enough to write a trojan that would go undetected.

[/ QUOTE ]

Actually, that's not really true... I don't know client/server and/or internet programming (taking that next semester). I do however know how to play poker, and I'm instinctively good at programming, sooo I was definitely qualified to write what I have so far lol [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]