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ABC Poker
APT is excellent to stop fish from being......fish. However, how does one progress to the next level?
I find myself making calls against APT advice or raising in position as that is what I would do in a live scenario. Pocket kings and someone bets as A on the board. A fold Is not always the best live for this, but APT ALWAYS suggests a fold
Additionally I win hands whilst going against APT advice, but no doubt this is bringing my IQ down. APT only ever recommends a bluff as a c-bet, but never a per flop bet in position in early stages. Should we be commended for winning hands we wouldn't win if following APT recommendations?
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I have wondered the same thing. My assessment of the "why":
The IQ is probably based on your equity against the opponent's estimated range.
The estimate of the opponent's range is based on a weighted-average of the bot's estimate of the likelihood of your opponent having certain holdings (e.g. nothing, top pair, overpair, set, etc.)
So somehow what would have to happen is a way for you to input your estimate of the likelihood of your opponent having certain holdings and having the IQ meter comparing the bot's estimate to yours.
I know that I am nowhere near enough of a programmer to even know where to begin to do all of that.
Also, my guess is that it would really slow down the # of hands played if you had to input your estimates on every hand.
My 2 cents here.....
I often find my own inclination is at odds with Daylian Cain's (he is favorite advisor), suggested course of action (even when the communal 28 advisors agree that folding is the ONLY answer). So I give it a shot... and, sometimes, I succeed. That's the wonder of practicing where there isn't any $$$ risk involved. I get the benefit of an experience that I may recall in a future situation. That takes me up a level!
It seems, as Allen has stated elsewhere, that practising against the bots, reading books and articles, running simulations with software tools etc, all contribute to my experience matrix when it comes time to get the chips in. That's why I invested in APT. For guidance, not rote answers!
I don't know whether the opposing bot's play style is part of what the advisors factor in. I'd hope so but in real life I, personally, don't have a clue about them (I mean my opposition) when I sit down. Playing with names hidden on APT sorta/kinda simulates this for me. Same thing happens when new/unknown players appear in the APT daily events. Eventually I get a read but I try to be a bit tentative til I do.
The bottom line for me is how I do against real players, which goes back to comments I've made in another thread about playing the APT daily tournaments. I know that APT has helped me to, rapidly regain, previous, but long dormant, skillz.
Hope I wasn't too longwinded..... I can't help myself sometimes
Syn
Hey guys. So here is the insanely long version of the IQ scores and what can be gained from looking at them, and the low down on the advice from the advisors. The TL;DR version is that IQ scores are only accurate in the long run, but they are VERY accurate in the long run and the advisors' advice is definitely not perfectly optimal advice and is based on many factors.
The IQ scores are based off of David Sklansky's Theory of Poker. If you haven't ever read that, you should. I think it is a must-read for any serious poker player and even for not-so-serious players. My personal opinion is that it is the best book I've ever read on poker. It is not a how-to book, it's a here's why book which is much more to my liking as an educator.
Quoting the theory directly from the book, here is what he says:
“Every time you play a hand differently from the way you would have played it if you could see all your opponents' cards, they gain; and every time you play your hand the same way you would have played it if you could see all their cards, they lose.”
“Conversely, every time opponents play their hands differently from the way they would have if they could see all your cards, you gain; and every time they play their hands the same way they would have played if they could see all your cards, you lose.”
-David Sklansky, The Theory of Poker
You, of course, can't see your opponents' cards, so poker is a game of incomplete information. However, WE CAN SEE ALL THE CARDS! Because of that, we can tell if you made a good decision in a true Sklansky sense.
Here's a really simplified example of how this works. Assume that you are in on the button in a cash ring game and UTG raises, everyone folds to you. You have KK. Obviously you are going to raise. Turns out, UTG has AA. Based on the Theory of Poker, raising or calling is a mistake because you wouldn't dare do that if the cards were face up. The cost of that mistake on that street is the amount you bet at that decision point less your equity in the total pot after your bet. Bummer luck, but in terms of Sklansky-optimal poker, you just lost money. Of course, in reality, your opponent has a range. So betting with your KK is, on average, a great decision and you are thrilled to be getting your money in here. As a good player, you shouldn't care that your opponent happened to have AA, because you know that against his entire range, your play was good and in the long run, you'll win money raising here. Say for example however that you are very tight and you fold your KK. That hand, you wouldn't gain or lose anything in IQ points because you happened to be correct that time. However, in the long run every time you folded that KK against the hands that were worse, you would lose your current equity in the existing pot. So in the long run, your opponent also would have had a number of hands you were beating, and your decision really stunk.
The better you are at estimating your opponent's actual range, and the better you are at calculating your equity in the pot, the higher your long-run IQ score will be. That's why we introduced those new equity and winning-odds tools, as well as the Upper Hand that you can find in the Tools and Games tab on your member page.
In any given small set of results, this calculation is clearly results-oriented. But in the long run, the IQ score is almost perfectly correlated with actual poker skill. If I run the IQ score on people who have played 50000 hands on APT for all their hands, I can rank them in terms of poker ability (at least in terms of against their ability to estimate their equity against the bots). The actual calculation is very complex (hundreds of terms) and Steve and I have worked on it for years in attempts to make the calculation and weighting of different things more precise.
The small sample weakness of the IQ score is why we typically tell members that it is really just for fun - people like getting an IQ score, but it really doesn't tell you much about your ability except over longer periods of time. For actual training, stick with training plans, the brain button (and the associated range button) and the odds tools. Just playing a bunch of hands and getting better with estimating your opponents' ranges and knowing your equity against them will improve you more than anything else in the true sense of the theory of poker.
Now, on to the advisors. The advice given by the advisors is based on their assessment of what they would do with your hand. It is strictly designed to be used as something to think about. I don't recommend taking their advice EVER when you are practicing, because that will change your training plan (because it becomes your action). Just think about their advice, look at the brain button to see a little more about why they think that is the best play, and contrast it with what you think you should do. Don't get results-oriented and start thinking that because you won and didn't follow the advice the advisor was wrong. By the same token, just because you lose and went against the advisor doesn't mean the advisor was right. In the long run, the advisors are what I would call "pretty ok". They definitely aren't great, although we are working on changes that should bring them closer to optimal play. For now, I'd recommend using them as just what they are - advice from a reasonably decent computer.
I hope that is helpful.
Thanks Allen. That was more than helpful, it was excellent!! Makes me glad to be a subscriber.
Great man
So a successful bluff (or even semi-bluff) would lower your poker IQ score, since you had the worst of it when you put your money down?
No, the opposite. Your opponent had better cards and you got them to fold. They wouldn't have done that if the cards were face up, so they lost their equity in the pot by folding, and you won it. That would raise your poker IQ.
Note that a successful double barrel bluff would also help. The first one would lower it by the amount of your bet less equity in the whole pot (because they called your bet with the better hand),, but then when the opponent eventually folded, you win their entire equity.
OK, that makes more sense.
I tried an "any two will do" session of about 150 hands at KGB level (not playing every hand, but playing most/all hands from CO or BTN), and I had a winning session, albeit with large fluctuation (had to do a second buy-in but ended over 200k) -- and without a big-time suckout win or anything.
And my Preflop IQ was 71 (4%)! Nice! Good thing I made up for it on later streets...
this was perfect Allen....I needed this long breakdown to help me understand more about this amazing site and how to better use it to increase my skills
perfect man...I needed this
That's helpful. Thanks.
I assume the IQ score also takes pot odds into account? How does it handle implied pot odds.
If villain and I each have 100 BB stacks, and villain raises 2 BB with AA, and I have 33 and call, does it count that as correct?
It does take into account pot odds, but not implied odds because it is highly debatable whether those exist or work out in any given player's favor in NL Hold'em - and they definitely don't exist at a single decision point. Now if you happen to take advantage of those 'implied odds' later on in the hand, you will benefit from that in your IQ score at that point in time.
In your example, your opponent is thrilled if you call with 33 when he has AA - you have made a mistake in an "All cards face up" sense. Down the line if you flop a set and he somehow manages to lose his stack with a single pair, then he has made a huge mistake and your poker IQ score will benefit from that. But the reality is you only hit the set about 1 out of 8 times, sometimes he improves more than you and you get stacked, and sometimes a player might continue on after the flop and lose more even when they don't improve their low pair. There's no way to objectively predict that at a point in time, so pot odds are considered in correctness of decision, but not any future possibilities. In the long run, the IQ score works out.
Good explanation. Thank you.