Texas Hold'em Hand Strength, Visualized • Hacker News Board

Re: Texas Hold'em Hand Strength, Visualized

#31

Post by mod » Mon, Feb 23, 2015, 7:13 PM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #26

juggernautq wrote: post #19

This doesn't consider the post-flop strategy though. Since heads-up limit holdem has been solved, it would be interesting to look at the EV of the hand with the optimal play. I would think hands like 22 should have been weaker than show down value suggested..

weakly solved. What was shown is essentially a optimal solution for playing against itself . Not an abitrary villain of unknown tendencies. Besides, limit is dead.

This is mostly untrue, to my understanding.

It was not solved to maximally exploit a bad villain, but it was solved to be unexploitable, and therefore unbeatable.

It would make mountains of chips vs 99%+ of players, probably at 80%+ of the possible rate.

Re: Texas Hold'em Hand Strength, Visualized

#32

Post by mod » Mon, Feb 23, 2015, 7:15 PM UTC

defen wrote: post #29

mod wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what this blog post was about at all, and certainly not what GP asked me to expand upon. You're not wrong, it's just off-topic, essentially. You could say that you need to account for talent, too--but at some point you're going beyond what can be analyzed, at least currently. NLHUHE is not a solved game.

I'm just saying, if you simply used these results to guide your bidding process, any halfway-decent player would take all your money.

These charts are nothing more than starting hand strengths. There's no mention of 'bidding process' on any street.

I'm not even sure how you could extrapolate a betting strategy from the post. It doesn't even mention money, let alone stack sizes, position, or any of the thousands of variables you might factor into an entire strategy.

Re: Texas Hold'em Hand Strength, Visualized

#33

Post by GCA10 » Mon, Feb 23, 2015, 7:28 PM UTC

davis_m wrote: post #6

regularfry wrote: post #4

Fascinating. I've seen a few remarkable showdowns between AQ and KK, I never would have guessed the odds were quite so tilted in KK's favour.

AQ vs KK is no different than A10 or AJ vs KK. Even middling Aces like A7 or A8 aren't much worse off because of the lost straight possibilities due to two K's being taken. I haven't looked at the numbers but I would bet that A2-A5 are better off against KK than AQ.

The numbers have arrived -- thanks to www.sliceeq.com -- and your hunch is right. After 100,000 Monte Carlo simulations, Slice declares that winning odds are as follows

KK (70.9%) vs AQsuited or AQoffsuit (29.1%)

KK (69.2%) vs A5suited or A5offsuit (30.8%)

The reason why the seemingly inferior hand of A5 does better is that it has about a 4.6% chance of making a straight. (Usually A2345, but conceivably something else) The AQ hand has only about a 2.7% chance of making a straight, because the deck is depleted of Kings, making the desired AKQJT straight hard to catch.

In general, Slice is a wonderful -- and free -- tool for testing various hand outcomes, particularly against likely ranges that an opponent might have.

NOTE: The simulation percentages above will vary slightly each time Slice goes hunting for 100,000 random hands. But the disparity between AQ and A5 generally is somewhere between 1.5 and 2 percentage points.

Re: Texas Hold'em Hand Strength, Visualized

#34

Post by cbeaumont » Mon, Feb 23, 2015, 7:39 PM UTC

jchendy wrote: post #28

Repost of my reddit rant about UX issues in this visualization: This is interesting, but the layout is pretty confusing for somebody who studies poker. Every other hand chart has AA in the top left, like these from Poker Stove: http://i.imgur.com/cvgvh.png Also, yours have duplicate information. As2d and 2dAs are both displayed, when in fact they are equal in poker. Most charts split up suited and offsuit hands, like…

OP here. Your points about the convention for lowercase and aces on the upper-left are fair. However, the duplicated information in these grids was intentional. I was less interested in building a standard suited/off suited odds table (those are readily available) or a strategy tool, and more interested in a visually clear way to explore the "probability landscape". I find these grids with duplicate information easier to grasp on first viewing. I also like seeing how subtle suit-based patterns in panel 1 cancel out when you average all slices into panel 2. You can't show that unless you retain all suit information

Re: Texas Hold'em Hand Strength, Visualized

#35

Post by defen » Mon, Feb 23, 2015, 7:45 PM UTC

mod wrote: post #32

defen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just saying, if you simply used these results to guide your bidding process, any halfway-decent player would take all your money.

These charts are nothing more than starting hand strengths. There's no mention of 'bidding process' on any street. I'm not even sure how you could extrapolate a betting strategy from the post. It doesn't even mention money, let alone stack sizes, position, or any of the thousands of variables you might factor into an entire strategy.

The post talks about "which hand is more likely to win". All I'm saying is that you don't care about how many hands you win, you care about how much money you win. It would be like measuring programmer productivity using number of lines of code written. This is obviously not an issue for someone who already understands poker, but if you didn't and you tried to use this table to scale your bets according to your overall likelihood of winning with a particular hand, then you wouldn't do well.

Re: Texas Hold'em Hand Strength, Visualized

#36

Post by starnixgod » Mon, Feb 23, 2015, 7:47 PM UTC

yannyu wrote: post #23

mod wrote: post #12

Looks like you used heads up hand strengths, and then full-table hand frequencies, and computed weighted hand strenghts based on that--which is a mistake, of course.

I'd love to do this with play-raise-fold frequencies by number of people at table. Are there relatively untainted public poker hand datasets? WSOP tournament data maybe?

There's a piece of software out there called PokerTracker that allows a user to gather hand data for real-time statistical analysis. There are users out there who have very large databases (Billions of hands) and some users who will buy/sell/exchange these databases.

Re: Texas Hold'em Hand Strength, Visualized

#37

Post by encoderer » Mon, Feb 23, 2015, 7:47 PM UTC

I don't mean to be OT, but does anybody play online anymore? I paid my (cheap) rent in college playing on FullTilt and PokerStars, but the (unreasonable) gov't crackdown seems to have put an end to online play. Or is there a secret I'm not in on?

Re: Texas Hold'em Hand Strength, Visualized

#38

Post by scott_s » Mon, Feb 23, 2015, 7:50 PM UTC

mod wrote: post #32

defen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just saying, if you simply used these results to guide your bidding process, any halfway-decent player would take all your money.

These charts are nothing more than starting hand strengths. There's no mention of 'bidding process' on any street. I'm not even sure how you could extrapolate a betting strategy from the post. It doesn't even mention money, let alone stack sizes, position, or any of the thousands of variables you might factor into an entire strategy.

I think you're in violent agreement with defen. You're probably so entrenched in Texas Hold'em thinking that it didn't even occur to you that a naive player may see this and think, "This hand is great! I'm going to bet it all!" defen is just pointing out that is a terrible idea, which I think you agree with, but it probably didn't occur to you that anyone could be so naive to even try.

Re: Texas Hold'em Hand Strength, Visualized

#39

Post by jonathansizz » Mon, Feb 23, 2015, 8:03 PM UTC

encoderer wrote: post #37

I don't mean to be OT, but does anybody play online anymore? I paid my (cheap) rent in college playing on FullTilt and PokerStars, but the (unreasonable) gov't crackdown seems to have put an end to online play. Or is there a secret I'm not in on?

The shutdown was only in the United States. You could cross the border to play freely. Inside the US, there's a couple of states that have legalized within-state play; other than that there are a few minor online venues (several hundred to a couple of thousand players online at any given time). I believe that r/poker has an updated list if you're interested.

Re: Texas Hold'em Hand Strength, Visualized

#40

Post by highCs » Mon, Feb 23, 2015, 8:05 PM UTC

mod wrote: post #12

Looks like you used heads up hand strengths, and then full-table hand frequencies, and computed weighted hand strenghts based on that--which is a mistake, of course.

Here are (correct?) preflop odds according to number of players: http://www.natesholdem.com/pre-flop-odds.php

And then, what's interesting is that with 2 players ak win at 67% and jj win at 77.5% (ak But at 10 players, ak wins at 20% and jj wins at 19.3% (ak > jj)

Illustrating the number of players changes the hand strength