Online Poker: Ain't that cheating?

[Phoenixx]

GOP is more fantasy whereas PSS3 is more realistic. This becomes obvious right away because both games have a totally different atmosphere.

BTW, although i didnt really play i just played two of my best games in PSS3. Started SingleRound and just kept pressing All-In. For the first couple of rounds the others kept folding, then i eliminated two of them with a flush. Another few rounds of folding followed, then i eliminated the three remaining ones, again with a flush. Game Over - Pot all mine. Too bad there is no 'Triple Knockout' award because i think that was the first time i eliminated 3 opponents at once. I already had 'DoubleKnockout' from an earlier game.

After that i played another SingleRound and promptly did it again. This time i first eliminated one, then another one. A few 'folding-rounds' later the three remaining ones all wanted to see my All-In and gone they were. Strike Two. The funny thing is that in my earlier SingleRound games, when i really 'played', (meaning when i not just clicked All-In regardless of my cards), i only made 2nd,...

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

i know what you mean. that right there is a good example of the format determining the best approach. ie, the more you can afford to bust out, the more you can afford to be aggressive. "the professor", howard lederer, advises having a bankroll 10-20x greater than your stack. meaning you could afford to bust out 10-20x before going absolutely broke.

but this approach won't work, statistically, in classical tournament format. in that case it's better to play 'real' and get those 2nd and 3rd-place finishes which will let you progress into the money. unless... unless... you are using your hyper aggression in the beginning of the tournament to try to build up a big stack, like phil ivey apparently does. he can afford to get knocked out early, and it's no problem because it will just free him up for cash / internet games in which he'll make money anyway.

 

[Phoenixx]

All good things...

Thats the third time today, this time with a straight. Difference is this time i really played.

And whats especially satisfying about this win is that it was the 'Chip and a Chair' Challenge, where you start with a mere 25k against five opponents with a 100k each.

Gee im really on fire today,...


EDIT: Removed big pix - click thumbnails to enlarge.

 

[Phoenixx]

And again...

Gee i really should have played for real money today,...

(Pix added so you dont think im just bragging.)

EDIT: Removed big pix - click thumbnails to enlarge.

 

[Phoenixx]

And again...

Thats the 5th time today i eliminated three opponents at once!

(Click thumbnails to enlarge.)

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

sweet. in that first pic, you almost have that exciting situation in which you have both a flush draw and a straight draw on the flop. if you only had one or the other, odds of hitting are less than 40%, but with both, the odds go up to 65%, i think. i love betting those types of things...

have you looked up these famous people (their bots, anyway) that you're playing against on youtube? after you learn the faces from PSS, i find it fun to see how they're like in real life.

 

[Phoenixx]

Nope, i wasnt even sure if they are real people.

Could be fun though,...will do that on occasion,...


BTW; Challenges are all completed now. Made 100% on all of them except for 'Blinded' (only 300k) and 'Button Power' (560k). But i will replay them until i make them with 100% too,...

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

yea, actual people and a real tournament. the game took all its details from the real thing. here's an example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__w-2MLSdFY

congrats on the challenges! i wasn't able to make 100% on all of them, and i accidentally erased PSS3 so now i'm back to playing PSS2, which doesn't have the challenges. :/

 

[Phoenixx]

Just stumbled upon another TH that looks pretty interesting.

CLICK

Think i will give the Demo a try.

[rant] If only these Demos were a litte longer than one lousy hour. Why not make it a week or so, so the user sees if its something they like to come back to? [/rant]

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

yea, a week or a few days would give a much better chance for an addiction to be created. of course, it would also bust a lot of these products since many of them can be 'solved' in that much time, meaning the user is ready to move on to something else and hasn't spent anything.

anyway, let us know how that one goes. i still have three more TH'E products to evaluate, specifically "telltale TH'E", "TH'E championship" and "tiks TH'E", all distributed by reflexive games.

 

[Phoenixx]

Well, i didnt download it. That is i tried to, but the download on their site is really a downloader and i dont like these things at all.

But maybe i can get it from elsewhere. Will take a look tomorrow,...

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

tried those three poker games i mentioned a few days ago. first two were terrible and i was ready to dismiss the third when i was... frankly, astonished by it. tik's texas hold 'em is by far the closest thing i've ever seen to what it's like to play online against real people.

okay, so far i've only played half an hour in a 1000-person tournament, but it's easy to see that this is a superior product. all kinds of options you can play with to get the gaming situation you like, and most importantly, you're forced to work on your vital call and raise calculations like GOP could only begin to require you to.

how do you handle situations in which you have far more than 40x the BB and are in a table of constantly-shifting strangers? these are exactly the problems one has online and in RL tournaments like the WSOP. i'm frankly amazed that there aren't more products like this, because it satisfies the people who want to play quick games against the computer as well as those seeking insights into how to deal with online play.

http://www.tikgames.com/pc/TiksTexasHoldem/tabid/67/default.aspx?id_game=41

 

[Phoenixx]

Looking at the screenshot, this seems to be the same game as that from my last link. Seems like BigFish only licenses other companies' games because the first GOP i had was really from a different company too.

Do you play the Demo or did you get the Fullversion?

 

[Phoenixx]

I just took a stab at Tiks and was rather disappointed.

The game just goes click, click, click, click, and you never really know what just happened. No narrator, no player pictures, all in all pretty boring.

Not my cup of tea at all, so far PSS3 with it great professional atmosphere is definitely the best that i have played so far.

Although the latest WSOP might be pretty good too. Too bad there is no Demo available because i would really like to give it a shot,...

 

[Phoenixx]

I just gave the first WSOP another whirl and i must say after playing PSS3 and getting used to that style of play i like the concept much better now. The first time i only compared it to GOP and didnt really like it. Thats also why i didnt buy 2007.

But now i think i will get 2007 after all. Have to go shopping tomorrow anyway, so if there are still copies there then ill take it. Will let you know how it plays and how much of a difference there is (if any) compared to the first WSOP,...

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

I just took a stab at Tiks and was rather disappointed.

The game just goes click, click, click, click, and you never really know what just happened. No narrator, no player pictures, all in all pretty boring.

that's what it's like online. (except you'd see avatars instead of head shots, which can often be more distracting than helpful)

you don't have anyone 'holding your hand' but you get all the vital info, like who's got the button and blinds, the pot size, the size of players' bets, etc. and you see their cards, of course, when they're forced to show them. those are the only things that should matter, because as you go from game to game and venue to venue, those are the only things that will be constant.

in tik's (full version, anyway), you can also fine-tune the speeds so that you get a longer look at what's happening. you can also set it to finish the hand right away whenever you fold, as in GOP and PSS.

i would agree that if you have no intention of ever making money online, this product is not as attractive as GOP and PSS. personally i'm interested in getting back into it at some point, so this game has use to me. it's not that hard to make money online if you're a disciplined player, because of the number of casual players out there. with all the televised poker events, lots of people want to just be part of that without having to particularly work at it.

EDIT: yea, i have WSOP for the gamecube, but never play it because it's at a friend's house and his gamecube broke. mostly what i'm interested in is practice at reading different types of AI's and adjusting my game accordingly. tik's is also useful because it includes those 'fish' players who have no plan and play with no consistency, but who nevertheless can be dangerous.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

if anyone comes across a poker product with four color decks, post it please? most / all of the online poker games use four color, but the only standalone (AI player) one i know about is the freeware pokerTH, but i'm not real crazy about their layout.


four color decks look like this, btw:

four color decks are so, so helpful, because you don't worry about making mistakes on flush reads this way. for this reason, a lot of poker pros want to change the standard deck to four-color in tournaments, but there is still tradition and a bureacracy to overcome...

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

...continuing my poker blog: :)

tik's has been doing a good job putting me in tournament mode so i decided to jump into pokerstars and play a tournament for the first time since last summer. i chose a 27-player, three table, 10K entry chip tournament.

made it to the halfway point in the field, then the final table, then #3 out of the paid positions (top five).

finally the stress got to me and i had to go into 'sleep' mode and take a walk around the block. i had completely forgotten how much more intense it is when you're playing real people and you're not in total control like in GOP or PSS.

"gigantes1966" is me-

in the end i couldn't catch much, and got whittled down by the blinds until i had to take a chance on an all-in, losing and busting out. but still finishing in fourth place and winning 27K chips on my 10K investment.

phew, i need to hit the exercycle now.

 

[juancar]

I played a lot of online poker a few years ago and never thought of using such cheating software. I always saw poker as a kind of sports and not a way to make a lot of money. Just wanted to have fun and improve my playing by playing with buddies, reading a poker website or practising online. Nevertheless, it's interesting that the developers are creating quite sophisticated software to analyze poker players.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

unfortunately, i think most serious online players are going to have to use such software. it's an arms race, and this is the latest munition. as soon as you sit down at an online table, other players are going to have stats on you available instantly (online databases analysing your previous public games), so you'll probably have to do the same.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

on another note, the final table of this year's world series of poker is being broadcast on ESPN tonight after tennis.

i don't really recognise any of the names besides phil ivey, unofficially the best player in the world. interestingly, you won't see his name in the last two "poker superstars" games because he failed to make the cut. (ie, he was one of the 24 invitees but didn't make the final 16, whose faces were used in the game)

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

er... i goofed. apparently the showing was only a rerun of the earlier action from this summer. the final table will actually be played starting november ninth.

also, i missed one of the nine players competing, namely jeff shulman, who we know from poker superstars III. the full list of players competing is:

Darvin Moon
Eric Buchman
Steven Begleiter
Jeff Shulman
Joseph Cada
Kevin Schaffel
Phil Ivey
Antoine Saout
James Akenhead

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

poker blog time. :)
... and a quiz below, if anybody wants to try it.

so i'm currently struggling along with online turbo tournaments- 360 players, 40 tables, one dime to enter, and the top finisher earns $8.50. the top 36 players also get paid, so if you learn the format it's not that hard to at least double your dime.

biggest problem for me is that i had gotten used to tik's, GOP and PSS, all of which let you stop at any point and take as much time as you need to make a decision. with the online versions you get limited time, the turbo versions even more limited, and actually that's a good thing, since waiting around for other people to act sucks...

this was a pretty significant hand for me, and i'll talk about that later. i am "gigantes" below:

Table Information
Seat: 1 nowptforme ($1405)
Seat: 3 bb lam ($4515)
Seat: 4 jodeljochen ($1460) Dealer
Seat: 5 josejames81 ($1160) Small Blind
Seat: 6 gigantes1966 ($1310) Big Blind
Seat: 7 spio123 ($1400)
Seat: 8 nco207 ($1445)
Seat: 9 pijaba ($3455)
Dealt to gigantes1966

Preflop (Pot:75)
FOLD spio123
FOLD nco207
FOLD pijaba
RAISE nowptforme $150
FOLD bb lam
FOLD jodeljochen
FOLD josejames81
CALL gigantes1966$100

Flop(Pot: $325)

BET gigantes1966$150
CALL nowptforme $150

Turn(Pot: $625)

CHECK gigantes1966
BET nowptforme $250

QUIZ:

the opponent may have just hit a flush, or at least top pair, which would beat your queens. what would you do in this situation?

a- call?
b- raise?
c- all in?
d- fold?

 

[TheMcD]

All in. There isn't a high risk involved (a dime was it?) and there's a high chance he might be bluffing. That, or he wets his pants and folds.

Then again, I have a tendency to play risky.

The McD

 

[Phoenixx]

I dont know,...in this situation i would probably ask if i can buy a vowel,...

:queen::king: