A Slave to Variance

hold'em[L] $ 40/80 Paradise Poker - Shoal Bay      Wed Apr 26  ante:0.00 blinds: 20.00 40.00  rake:3.00 pot: 1037 [9h 5c Qc 6d 9s]   Dcifrths      1784  1 Scc  kf                     80   -80   Brentie       1017  0 Br   brc  b    b           400   637 [Qh Ac]   SueHFA        1140  5 cc   cR   c    c           400  -400 [Qd Kd]   mrstyle       5532  4 f                            0     0  *Andrew        3557  3 cc   rf                    160  -160 [Ad 9d]   Dopey         2493  2 f                            0     0

It’s not often you get a chance to raise/fold in a multiway pot on the flop. Usually, this play is reserved for pocket pairs, which are brittle in the sense that once you have a certain amount of information they become almost worthless. Here it’s a bit different, as I’ve got middle pair, top kicker. The problem is that due to the nature of the action, my ace outs are very tainted, so while my effective outs may not be as low as two, they are certainly less than three.

Of course, my two outer would have come in on the river, but I’ll take solace in the fact that when I got out I was crushed.

Here’s another cute hand:

hold'em[L] $ 40/80 Paradise Poker - Onslow         Wed Apr 26  ante:0.00 blinds: 20.00 40.00  rake:3.00 pot:  697 [2c Jd 9c 5c Ad]   mrstyle       2287  1 Sf                          20   -20  *Andrew        1637  0 Bc   kr   b    b           320   377 [3d 4d]   mixfreeze     1197  9 f                            0     0   orkids        1578  8 f                            0     0   Rusty-Nail    3108  7 f                            0     0   jfthomas2     3472  6 f                            0     0   Dcifrths      5235  5 f                            0     0   Mr.Lee        1600  4 Pkf                         40   -40   panman36      1719  3 f                            0     0   SueHFA        2772  2 r    bc   c    c           320  -320 [Qd Qh]

I defend with 43s, and flop nut low. What does one do with nut low? Why raise, and bet, and bet, of course. The river suckout is an added bonus, but by no means necessary.

I originally wrote PokerTrace as a first cut at a hand reviewing tool. I put in a lot of time and energy to make it pretty and to provide the ability to click on any action. The idea was that when you clicked on an action you’d launch a tool which brought up a complete snapshot of all the relevant information you might need to make that specific decision. I never did that. In practice, I’ve found that the lack of navigational tools hampered the utility of the application. The original idea was that you’d be able to use PokerTrace to get a line on how your opponents play. As such, all the filters were geared toward
displaying hands which a specific opponent had shown down. The problem here is that to be effective, you need a lot of hands to get that line.

Ideally, I’d have wired PokerTrace to my database, and used them together to provide a large pool of hands so that you could simply and easily filter through all the hands that you have. Unfortunatly, my database is not in any kind of publicly consumable form, and won’t be ready for quite a while. Without access to a complete history of all hands, any reviewing tool is better suited to session level review. As a session review tool PokerTrace is ok, but with only a crude filter for selecting interesting hands, and no actualy hand/session summary data, it’s doesn’t really do the task justice.

So I’m starting on the slow path to creating a solid session reviewing tool. The first step in the process is to revamp and retool PokerTrace, and make it actually mildly useful for reviewing your own session. If you have any requests or ideas about features you’d like to see in such a tool please post them here.

Thanks,

- Andrew