The Poker Nerd

Yesterday’s game reminded me of a concept I have jokingly referred to as “toaster equity.”

I sat down at a 1/2 table around 1 pm and knew immediately I could make a lot of money there. Lots of multi-limper hands, big bets with lots of callers, an all-in every 3-5 hands. And, within two hours, my US$200 buy-in is already up to US$600.
(more…)

I realized a hole in my tournament game this weekend based on blind progression.

A rule of thumb with tournaments is that, the faster the blinds progress, the more aggressive you have to be to survive (all other things being equal.) My mistake was thinking of blind progression velocity as a function of time when, in fact, it’s a function of hand-count.

(more…)

This week, Andy Bloch writes about continuation bets. I’ve been thinking about the subject a lot. Unfortunately, the article barely touches on the one aspect I’ve been thinking about most: position.

(more…)

I’ve got a Big Project I’ll be talking about shortly, but I wanted to kick out an interesting problem that’s going to be part of the bigger project. The question is: How do you numerically rank starting hands in Texas Hold ‘Em?

I’ve seen plenty of systems which categorize starting hands into groups. But, what I need is a programmatic way to give an absolute numeric value to all two-card starting hands. For a first iteration, it should fulfill at least all the following:

AA > KK > AK
AKs > AKo
AKs ~= QQ
22 > A2o > 72.

This is surprisingly difficult.