Working on Your Game - Part II

In my last column, I discussed some of the advantages and disadvantages of trying to improve your game through reading. One of the chief drawbacks of reading (as practice) is that it's a poor way to learn anything that must be learned procedurally rather than declaratively. As is the case with hitting a golf ball or playing the piano, you can improve only so much by reading.

You could work on your game by actually playing. This has some nice advantages. You don't have to worry about how realistic it is. It's real (although practicing at one table might be poor practice for the next). And if playing poker isn't at least part of your program for improvement, you'll lag behind. However, there are a few clear disadvantages. First, for beginners especially, it can get expensive learning with real money at stake. Second, if playing is your only mode of practice, you're missing out on some other techniques that offer more rapid returns on your time investment.

A more subtle disadvantage of the learn-by-doing approach is that actually playing poker provides feedback that's difficult to interpret, especially to new players. The short-term variance inherent in poker means that the most obvious feedback – how much you win or lose after making some decision – is liable to be uninformative. Sessions in which you play most poorly may be among your most profitable. Although these disadvantages are more severe for less experienced players, who may be working out more basic issues about which hands are playable, they affect anyone who's trying to improve by playing.

If you can't practice exactly the skill you're interested in, at least you want to get as close as possible. If you have a reasonably capable computer, online poker and computer simulators provide new options for learning by doing that overcome some of these obstacles. Although they're most valuable to the relatively inexperienced player, simulators have some features that should be of interest to anyone who likes to think about poker.

Online poker sites today are dominated by commercial sites that offer play-money as well as real-money games. The promise of play-money games is that you can get the same kind of practice you'd get from actually playing, but without risking anything but your time. And the games can be substantially more fast-paced than cardroom play, in principle accelerating the learning process. Online poker offers another advantage in that you can keep records of your play very easily. Different sites offer different facilities, but many if not all provide for keeping detailed records of everything you've seen at the table.

Two drawbacks limit the utility of live online poker as a practice tool. First, players in these games don't always play like the players you'd expect to see in money games. Many are playing play-money games because they're inexperienced, or even just don't feel like playing well. Some are bench testing new strategies, strategies that won't pan out. Truly odd betting patterns emerge that are much less likely at money tables (for example, blowing off a huge stack of chips by raising and reraising with nothing, hand after hand). Second, if you're practicing for live games, there are lots of features of live poker you'll be missing, including the opportunity to pick up tells, and the necessity of controlling your own physical behavior. Although some tells are possible in online play, if you're practicing for in-person live play, you'll find online practice of little help in this area.

Despite these drawbacks, online poker for play money is a viable way for newcomers to develop familiarity with the game cheaply. Because it offers such an easy entry into the game, especially as computers and Internet connectivity become more ubiquitous, these online games will become indispensable to new players who would like to play for small stakes, but lack the experience to feel confident about playing for real money.

Computer simulators, by contrast, attempt to simulate the actions of real human opponents, in principle giving you the same kind of practice as if you were playing against human opposition over your computer. Simulators have many of the same advantages of live online play – the play is free (although the software isn't), the practice is rapid, and you can analyze your play in excruciating detail. In fact, depending on the settings you use, since simulators never have to wait for a human to make a decision (other than yourself), you can get in far more hands per hour than with any other form of poker. And built-in tools for analysis of your game make it easy to identify weaknesses in your game. If you're a consistent loser with K-Q suited against simulated opponents, you shouldn't expect to be able to play it profitably against real opponents.

Simulators offer another feature that isn't available anywhere else. You can take yourself out of the loop completely, pitting computer players against each other. Without a human being in the mix, the simulation can proceed extremely rapidly, making it possible to analyze specific situations in great detail. For example, if you want to know if raising with A-K suited under the gun is a good idea in a wild hold'em game, use the software to run that situation a few million times, with and without the raise, with the other opponents assigned random cards, and see what happens.

Another use I've found for this kind of software is as a quick refresher when I've been out of action for a while. I might not know who will be at the table when I show up, but a bit of time with a good simulator will help get me at least part of the way back to anticipating the situations that will arise when I play.

Computer simulators do have drawbacks. The big one is that while they do a better job every year of simulating human play (it can be argued they already have some weaker tables down pat), they don't always act quite like humans. They have systematic weaknesses that can be exploited, and often fail to exploit weaknesses of yours that better human players would take advantage of. So, if you're losing with 10-9 suited against the simulator, you should rethink where you play it against live opponents. But if you're doing quite well with the hand, you may just have been the beneficiary of some of the simulator's quirks. As well, it's not always easy to do fine-grained analysis at this level. You may be winning overall with A-J suited despite the fact that you're consistently playing it in a few bad spots. If you run simulations of particular situations, the results may be distorted by the limitations in the simulator. The less your real opponents play like the simulator, the more severe this problem will be.

Despite these limitations, simulators can certainly provide useful information, especially about the profitability of simple strategic adjustments against predictable opponents, and can be of especially great help if you have gaping holes in your game. We can only expect them to get more sophisticated, both in the modeling of opponents and in the analysis capabilities they provide. As they do, they'll become increasingly useful to increasingly experienced players.