
Texas Hold'em Hand Strength, Visualized - alexcasalboni
http://chrisbeaumont.org/holdem_odds/#8H+QS
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mod
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.

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yannyu
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?

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mod
You can buy huge databases from other players, yes. They're full data sets,
not "tainted," and have far more hands than have ever been played in the WSOP.

It's considered bad form in the poker world, and generally against site TOS,
if you're a player using the data to have a read on a player before you've
ever played him.

If you're just doing research, nobody cares at all. They might even give you
the datasets, if they actually believe you. Or perhaps if you let them
anonymize them?

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avalaunch
Unless I've misunderstood you, it's really not considered bad form at all.
It's considered pretty standard amongst professional poker players that most
everyone (at least the professionals) are all using some form of HUD (heads-up
display) that will overlay stats next to each opponent's name, detailing all
sorts of useful information about the player's tendencies. It's almost
mandatory to use a HUD if you like to multi-table more than 4 tables at once.

~~~
duncanawoods
Collecting and mining hands you play\see is fine but its the buying and
selling of other people's datasets that is bad form / banned. In the small
circles of nose-bleed games, it is resembles collusion when a team shares data
to undermine a single target across a set of games.

~~~
avalaunch
It's still pretty standard to mine hands that you didn't personally
participate in. Lots of players mine nonstop. You're right that you're
probably crossing the line when you buy/share other people's datasets, as
you'll get information that your opponent can't possibly get without also
sharing/buying datasets. That being said, of the nose-bleed players I
personally knew it was still the norm to share data with your friends. I think
at that level you just have to assume that all of your previously played hands
are visible to all your opponents and adjust accordingly.

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encoderer
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?

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pcthrowaway
Seals With Clubs. Deposit bitcoin. Play with bitcoin. Withdraw bitcoin.
Probably not legal in the U.S. but it's a great site (and they don't check
your IP origin afaik, though you could probably get in with TOR or a proxy
anyway).

~~~
albedoa
Seals With Clubs shut down three days ago:
[http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29/news-views-
gossip/seals...](http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29/news-views-gossip/seals-
clubs-shutting-down-1512542/)

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jchendy
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](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 the ones above or this one from Equilab which lists out every
combo separately like you do:
[http://i.imgur.com/BqS1iht.png](http://i.imgur.com/BqS1iht.png)

Your input format is also confusing. On your site, users have to type '6C 6D'
but everywhere else on the internet, that would be written '6c6d'

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cbeaumont
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

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juggernautq
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..

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TylerE
_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.

~~~
mod
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.

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cju
It reminds me the "Temperature Maps" by Sho Sengoku in backgammon [1]. For a
given move, it syntheses the equities (somehow probability of winning) for
each possible dice roll of the opponent on next turn. It allows among other
thing to see how dependent of luck you be after a move (by looking at the
contrast between squares).

[1]
[http://www.bkgm.com/articles/Sengoku/TemperatureMap/index.ht...](http://www.bkgm.com/articles/Sengoku/TemperatureMap/index.html)

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regularfry
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.

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davis_m
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.

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GCA10
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.

~~~
cleatsupkeep
Additionally, if AQ has made a straight with a K, KK now has a redraw to a
full house. If the flop was KJT, KK still has a 34% chance to win the hand.

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ChuckMcM
I enjoyed this analysis, I went through something similar when designing a
bridge hand 'strength' estimator as part of an automated bidding program. I'm
going to have to go back and see if I can borrow some of these ideas :-)

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Aardwolf
I thougt that a 2 and a 7 were the worst, but here a 2 and 3 has -35.4%
win%-lose% while 2 and 7 has a slightly better -30.8% win%-lose% (second
diagram). Any idea what the difference is?

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soupboy
Not a poker expert by far, but this could be because 2/3 can only participate
in three straight draws (A2345,23456,34567) whereas 2/7 can be in seven
straight hands. (A2345, 23456, 34567, 45678, 56789, 6789T, 789TJ)

~~~
mod
Suffice it to say that no, that's not the reason.

The reason is entirely high-card strength vs all the hands including cards
less than 7, like 65, 64, etc.

EDIT: And the value of pairing the 7 vs pairing the 3, again where high card
strength matters--6X pairing the 6 won't matter as often.

Given there's only two hands, they are somewhat likely to showdown unimproved,
not making a pair or better. If you analyzed ten handed tables, 2-7 fares the
worst.

