Poker Winner Blog

Getting lots of practice quickly

Here’s another fabulous timesaver available in some of the Wilson Software programs. Once you set up a game and click to start it, a screen instantly pops up to ask whether you want to be dealt random hands, hands worth at least a call, or strictly raising hands. (Now don’t you just wish you could do that in a real game?)

The zipping and hand-skipping features enable you to play 60,000 hands — the equivalent of a full year’s play in a live game at 30 hands per hour, eight hours per day — in a quarter of that time (or less). It’s a lot like typing; you’ll get faster and faster as you practice. How many hands can you play per hour? Except for those hands you elect to play out, your speed will be limited mostly by how fast you can click that mouse.

Playing at a higher level

When you’re comfortable playing poker on the computer, tackle these techniques — and tackle them sooner rather than later because they’re not difficult:

• To see how well you’re doing, click Stats at the bottom of the screen. On the list of options that appears, click Play Evaluation to see colorful charts that assess your overall play and your play at each betting level versus the play of the programmed advisor. If there are clear areas of weakness in your game, you can pinpoint them here. Then explore the garden of informative charts, graphs, and tables tucked behind other Stats options.
• Over the course of an hour or so, play only A-A, say, in Hold’em or play A-K-Q-J in Omaha High, or a hidden high pair in Stud by clicking Game Setup-Stack the Deck. You’ll gain experience in a variety of situations — experience that might take you a year or more to accumulate in real games. In each practice session, work on different hands. Keep a chart of acceptable starting hands handy and work methodically through it over a number of sessions.
• Like to practice playing only the big blind, small blind, or button? Find yourself calling too often in early position? To toughen up your play where it’s weakest, click Modify Game Settings-Freeze the Button to indulge yourself in an orgy of same-position play.
• Combine the Stack the Deck option with Freeze the Button. Play A-K in the big blind for only several rounds, then on the button, and so on. (Create parallel situations in Omaha with four cards.) You can also stack the flop, turn, and river cards (and opponents‘ hands, as well) to replicate hands from books you study, or to replay the hands of your worst nightmares.
• Most beginners would rather sit in a full-handed game than play shorthanded. Learn to profit from shorthanded games the easy way — make them a staple of your practice sessions. Don’t forget to reduce the rake (the portion of each pot taken by the house)! (Yes, you can do that, too!)

Figure out how to modify the preprogrammed computer opponents, create new ones, and use both in combination with high-speed simulations to do your own poker research.

Dealing with computer opponents

Here’s where you can really be creative! Remember the fun you had mixing paints or building blocks or modeling clay when you were a kid? There was always a thrill in creating something new, wasn’t there?

Using the options available under Profile in most programs, you can do the following:

• You can modify playing styles of the 40 or so imaginatively and often humorously named cyberopponents.
• You can also create new ones by blending preprogrammed profile characteristics of the originals. (The originals are never lost, however — just temporarily altered or borrowed. They revert to their natural selves whenever you give the word.)
• You can name your new creations and put them in action at a virtual table. When you do this, you are “loading” them into the “lineup” — your selected group of players for a game.

Although you can use entirely preprogrammed lineups if you wish, take advantage of the more open-ended options to mimic players in your favorite live game. Or create a player profile that plays like you do and toss it into different lineups to see how it performs.

l You can arrange to have players entering and leaving randomly every
couple of rounds, just as they would in a real casino poker game.

To find out how to use the Profile and Lineup options, first read the pertinent tips. (Clicking the Tips button brings up a handy list.) Click the Help button if necessary. Digest the comprehensive manual in small doses, and remember that you can contact Wilson software anytime for more assistance. Don’t be afraid to experiment!

Running simulations

Simulations are very high-speed tests in which the computer does all the playing so that you can learn something. If you want to test something concerning your own strategy, you can customize a player profile to mimic your playing style and load it into the lineup for your test . The computer “sits in” for you while it plays out the equivalent of a yearlong (or longer) game with the rest of your chosen lineup, then presents you with the game statistics. You’ll know how much you won — or lost — to the penny.

In a “smart” (computerized) simulation — the only kind that won’t give you misleading results — the computer plays its usual strategic game for each cyberopponent you’ve loaded. It simply does so at lightning speed. The resulting statistics summarize what happened under realistic game conditions in which bets, raises, reraises, and checkraises force opponents to either fold or pay dearly for their mistakes.

The games from Wilson Software do only smart simulations unless you specifically set up a “dumb” or “shutdown” simulation that simply deals out cards to see who wins, and then records the results. Dumb simulations produce misleading results, and you really won’t find them helpful in improving your game.

Modern computers handle such tasks in an amazingly small amount of time. You might be able to grab a soda and check the sports scores while the computer plays a million hands of whatever situation you’ve set up! That’s right — a million hands! (You can even run a test for three million or more — the equivalent of a lifetime of poker — while you watch a football game. Your computer should have the test results ready for your review by halftime!)

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