Poker Perambulation

I bought this package. I know a lot of folks have used it with Hold’em. I recall CC liked to mention VP$IP. The package is valuable as a record keeping tool. This can vary as importing can be either labor intensive or automated. As to the bells and whistles it hypes, I don’t see it working very well. The flop games may do it better.

On the plus side it lets you manipulate how you see the data. It has a fair degree of flexibility in that. I’m using it on Stars which is automated and provides a very easy data collection setup. The package has value in saving you from the scut work of maintaining some form of an Excel setup that would be less accurate and far more labor intensive.

Here is something that I wouldn’t get any other way. It was easy to put together using the tools provided.

You can see that connected cards don’t play all that well for me. That is even when there is a premium card in the mix. Premium in stud is the Broadway cards. And it well demonstrates that even when you make a hand with the weaker ones, you are subject to trouble. Demonstrates a leak that I need to pay more attention to.

My real grip that ran through some insulting email from both sides concerned forced bringins. I told him he wasn’t getting it right. He challenged that. I documented an almost 100 hand session where the Stars’ data and his came up with almost identical percentages. In those hands I had the force bringin for 17 hands. There is no way the data should be almost identical – regardless. He wanted the data and I explained to him that as a database programmer there is no reason to depend on the random dataset for determining accuracy. He said he had many thousand such hands already. His approach with me left me dubious to say the least about his credentials.

Back in the days where I was a computer guru – long past – expert systems were the big item and got the venture capital. The idea was you could make up rules that would allow you to be an expert in a field where a rules system had established how an expert thinks. From plumber to statesmen, you would be given a magic key to their thought process and this would all appear when processors got a bit faster. Processors are massively faster today. Needless to say, you still don’t see a lot of that being offered today. It bombed. Like the bots that concern us, the promise is behind the results being obtained.

PokerTracker has its expert system. It places little icons on players. The default setup blows. There are pleas for something workable on their stud forums. I just don’t see it being possible based on the data available. If it could see everyones pocket cards, it might stand a snowballs chance of working. As it exists, the dataset is always inadequate to determine anything of value. Across the collection of fish, dice, telephone, etc. icons are people who are solid winners or losers.

So, looking at the whole, is the package worth the price? I will answer yes. It is a very flawed application to my view. However, the look at categories and the ability to import and export added data make it a useful package. It may be clumsy or awkward but it has more info in the notes area that makes it attractive for just that feature. You can see more data inside the program itself than you could assemble on your own. If you think that analysis will come about automagically, think again.

The last annoyance is the data collection. On PokerStars, forcing data collection brings my Intel Dual Core @ 2.4G to its knees. That’s still pretty close to SOTA and the program saturates the processor. Not knowing the exact datastream makes it impossible to say with certainty that the code block here sucks but you have to suspect it does.

If I want Bodog data, I have to pay an outsider for an import tool. I don’t play there enough to even consider the whorehouse price of that addon.

I’m not disappointed with my investment but it did seem to promise more than it delivers.

ADDENDUM:

As of this morning, PT says I am a winner of $173.70. If you go back through the blog you’ll see I did detail winnings that were nicely higher not too long ago. I had about $30-40 in the account in late December when I started playing on PokerStars almost exclusively. I played a $16.50 HORSE tournament the other day. I may have played a couple of 5’s over the roughly 3-months. So, why is that balance $108.61? At most I dorked off the starting balance at tournaments and whatever. I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. But, I am left in a quandary over the disparity. As a really poor record keeper before PT came along, I’d be thinking I’m weaker than the data shows.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 10:38 am and is filed under Journal, Other poker. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.