Compared to online poker, participation in a live poker event the scenario is very different. Although in its scientific purity, when dealing with live tournaments, the strategies suggested by the mono-disciplinary analysis of mathematics are not suitable. Probabilistic math is the only possible tool to break down variance in online poker. In live poker this alone is not enough anymore. In live poker, in fact, you can never “massare” as it happens in the online. For this reason, the strategies developed on quantitative and long-term analyses no longer work and variance dominates. That’s the reason why the strategies developed on quantitative and long-term analyses no longer work and variance dominates.
Quantity issue
Considering the empirical dynamics of a live tournament, identifying the playing ranges of opponents, in the pre-flop phase, is not as “simple” as it happens online. A software like Hold’em Manager can establish, for each subject in play, the typical behavior that the same adopts during the sessions, translating into percentage indices, each action performed during the various stages of the spot in relation to the expected value of the same compared to the pot generated. To be reliable, however, it is necessary that the software processes at least dozens of thousands of the observed subject’s actions.
The ineffectiveness of quantitative analysis in live poker
In the case of an online pro with a volume of open tables of twenty units , the software manages to process over a thousand hands per hour, against an average of twenty-five hands in a live tournament. It’s quite clear that in a live tournament session, quantitative analysis is outclassed by variance, making this tool not enough to solve the challenges that, progressively, the game offers.
New tools are needed, which are able to offer qualitative analysis models able to investigate the “here and now”, abandoning the classical quantitative models.
Go to the next article not to lose the thread of the discussion on the Skill Poker Index, or go to the first article of the series to resume it.
Pietro Semeraro
Transl. by Margherita Basile
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