POCKET ACES

Saturday, November 11, 2000
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Pocket Aces

Poker, People and Software

By Maryann Guberman

For years now, people have been debating the value of computer software that teaches poker. The main argument is almost universally, "Poker requires skill but first and foremost it is a people game." The secondary argument is that "Experience is the best teacher."

Let's just accept those two facts and move on and look at this controversy from a different perspective. Surgery, for example, is a skill. And while experience might make a more proficient surgeon, would you want to be his first open-heart patient? Wouldn't you want your doctor to have observed, practiced and assisted an expert before breaking open your rib cage and touching your heart?

If that example doesn't fit, how about this one. Reading is a learned skill. Very few people can pick up a book and read it without having some kind of tutelage. Computers can teach the alphabet, phonics, sentence structure, and speed-reading.

If you use the computer to help you learn how to play a better game of poker, you're ahead of those people who rely totally on experience. You won't learn everything there is to know about the game, but then, even people who have been practicing and playing their entire lifetime haven't reached that apex.

Wilson Software, for instance, produces a terrific group of aids under their "Turbo" series. There's Turbo Texas Hold'em, Turbo Seven-Card Stud, Turbo Omaha plus the high-low versions‹and a tournament game. This software has been developed to simulate live action, and it includes a lineup of players that compare to the kind of people you might meet in a casino or home game. For example, if you consistently play in a high-stakes game with rock-tight opponents, you can set up your computer game to mimic that. If you have success against a certain type of player but fail to beat another type, you can choose to include some of these problem opponents in your game and practice various tactics to see how you might beat them at their game.

What you try to achieve with the computer is a level of expertise at reading cards, estimating odds and probabilities, testing yourself to see if you are playing too tight or too loose, and experimenting with different approaches to different opponents. The object is to learn the game from computerized situations not to win every hand or even win the pot. There's another piece of software designed as entertainment that serves this purpose. It's the World Series of Poker Adventure Game. Here the object is to beat the computer so you can advance to the big poker tournament. There's no tutorial, no magic buttons for adjusting the players in the game, nothing to teach you poker. It's a fun game, not an educational tool.

Over the last ten or twelve years, several companies have produced poker software, much of it good in its time. Wilson Software puts out the only tutorials that are updated frequently.

Meanwhile, there is software that, while not updated for several years, serves a completely different but totally useful purpose. PokerWiz and Poker Probe are two programs that analyze hands. These are helpful to people who want hard statistics to back up theory and because they are based on randomly-generated hands, there's no real need to upgrade them.

And finally, there's something called StatKing, which has nothing to do with learning how to play poker but which can actually force you to become a better poker player by virtue of the records you keep on it.

StatKing will help you keep track of your poker life. It will calculate your win rate, your hourly standard deviation, how long it will take you to break even, how much you can expect to win, your chances of going broke, and your bankroll requirements. As long as you feed the software accurate information, it will spit out all kinds of useful facts such as win rates for certain time frames (weekends, for example), longest winning and losing streaks, and biggest win percentage.

For those who have never played poker in a casino, the World Series of Poker Adventure is a good starting point because it involves little more than playing poker while it familiarizes the user with who bets when; how much they can bet, and when it's okay to fold or raise.

For players who want to improve their skills, Wilson Software is the answer.

For individuals who like to dig into the deep recesses of poker mathematics, either PokerWiz or Poker Probe will do the trick.

And for anybody who plays poker more than a few times a year, StatKing deserves that second part of its title.

There's really nothing to debate.