Texas Hold'em Hand Strength, Visualized

[mod]

Looks like you used heads up hand strengths, and then full-table hand frequencies, and computed weighted hand strenghts based on that--which is a mistake, of course.

[highCs]

Here are (correct?) preflop odds according to number of players: http://www.natesholdem.com/pre-flop-odds.php

And then, what's interesting is that with 2 players ak win at 67% and jj win at 77.5% (ak < jj)

But at 10 players, ak wins at 20% and jj wins at 19.3% (ak > jj)

Illustrating the number of players changes the hand strength

[yannyu]

I'd love to do this with play-raise-fold frequencies by number of people at table. Are there relatively untainted public poker hand datasets? WSOP tournament data maybe?

[asselinpaul]

Could you expand on this please.

[encoderer]

I don't mean to be OT, but does anybody play online anymore? I paid my (cheap) rent in college playing on FullTilt and PokerStars, but the (unreasonable) gov't crackdown seems to have put an end to online play. Or is there a secret I'm not in on?

[mod]

There's a couple of sites where you can still play, however there's not much action and you essentially can't cash out.

I have a buddy with ~200k on some network, I think merge, and he has a pending cashout for 2k (the max) that has been pending for months. He can't initiate another until the last has been resolved.

Until about a year ago (post-black-friday, of course) he was able to remove about 12-14k/year, given the wait time per check and the maximum of 2k per check.

You need to move or play in a casino.

[jonathansizz]

The shutdown was only in the United States. You could cross the border to play freely. Inside the US, there's a couple of states that have legalized within-state play; other than that there are a few minor online venues (several hundred to a couple of thousand players online at any given time). I believe that r/poker has an updated list if you're interested.

[slb]

Online poker for real money is still strong outside the USA, and there are a few state-specific enterprises (for example, wsop.com and--until recently--the unfortunately named Ultimate Poker in Nevada) starting for USA states that have specifically legalized online poker.

[Ollinson]

Online poker is very much alive. You can check it out for yourself twitch.tv

I personally recommend pokerstaples stream. He's a very math based MTT player.

[pcthrowaway]

Seals With Clubs. Deposit bitcoin. Play with bitcoin. Withdraw bitcoin. Probably not legal in the U.S. but it's a great site (and they don't check your IP origin afaik, though you could probably get in with TOR or a proxy anyway).

[kimcheekumquat]

You can try Bovada. Fairly soft site with decent deposit and withdrawal options.

[rjett]

bovada... not nearly as many players as there used to be when it operated as bodog, but it'll still scratch your itch.

[jchendy]

Repost of my reddit rant about UX issues in this visualization:

This is interesting, but the layout is pretty confusing for somebody who studies poker.

Every other hand chart has AA in the top left, like these from Poker Stove: http://i.imgur.com/cvgvh.png

Also, yours have duplicate information. As2d and 2dAs are both displayed, when in fact they are equal in poker. Most charts split up suited and offsuit hands, like the ones above or this one from Equilab which lists out every combo separately like you do: http://i.imgur.com/BqS1iht.png

Your input format is also confusing. On your site, users have to type '6C 6D' but everywhere else on the internet, that would be written '6c6d'

[cbeaumont]

OP here. Your points about the convention for lowercase and aces on the upper-left are fair. However, the duplicated information in these grids was intentional. I was less interested in building a standard suited/off suited odds table (those are readily available) or a strategy tool, and more interested in a visually clear way to explore the "probability landscape". I find these grids with duplicate information easier to grasp on first viewing. I also like seeing how subtle suit-based patterns in panel 1 cancel out when you average all slices into panel 2. You can't show that unless you retain all suit information

[juggernautq]

This doesn't consider the post-flop strategy though. Since heads-up limit holdem has been solved, it would be interesting to look at the EV of the hand with the optimal play. I would think hands like 22 should have been weaker than show down value suggested..

[TylerE]

weakly solved. What was shown is essentially a optimal solution for playing against itself. Not an abitrary villain of unknown tendencies.

Besides, limit is dead.

[mod]

Good luck with that decision tree for 1.3 trillion hands!

[cju]

It reminds me the "Temperature Maps" by Sho Sengoku in backgammon [1]. For a given move, it syntheses the equities (somehow probability of winning) for each possible dice roll of the opponent on next turn. It allows among other thing to see how dependent of luck you be after a move (by looking at the contrast between squares).

[1] http://www.bkgm.com/articles/Sengoku/TemperatureMap/index.ht...

[regularfry]

Fascinating. I've seen a few remarkable showdowns between AQ and KK, I never would have guessed the odds were quite so tilted in KK's favour.

[davis_m]

AQ vs KK is no different than A10 or AJ vs KK. Even middling Aces like A7 or A8 aren't much worse off because of the lost straight possibilities due to two K's being taken.

I haven't looked at the numbers but I would bet that A2-A5 are better off against KK than AQ.

[Devthrowaway80]

Yup, it's a classic poker situation referred to as a "race".

Interesting visualization!

[benihana]

AQ, AJ and A10 are all deceptively okay hands (not exceptional like AA, AK, KK, not quite mediocre like J10, QJ) because of the Ace.

[ChuckMcM]

I enjoyed this analysis, I went through something similar when designing a bridge hand 'strength' estimator as part of an automated bidding program. I'm going to have to go back and see if I can borrow some of these ideas :-)

[Aardwolf]

I thougt that a 2 and a 7 were the worst, but here a 2 and 3 has -35.4% win%-lose% while 2 and 7 has a slightly better -30.8% win%-lose% (second diagram). Any idea what the difference is?

[davis_m]

72 offsuit is the worst hand against a table of opponents because it is the lowest hand that has no straight or flush opportunities (using both hole cards)

23 offsuit is the worst hand against a single opponent because the likelihood of needing a straight or flush to win the hand decreases and the penalty for having a lower highcard is higher.

[jdmichal]

I'm going to guess that, after you enumerate all possible opposing hands along with all possible table cards, that the 7 gets paired up for a win more often than the straight lines up for a win. Also, due to their low card value, a 2-3 will pretty much automatically lose with no pairings, straights, or flushes. (And even then, it's a weak flush.)

If you look at the final diagram, they are almost equal in average expected payout, with the 2-7 dropping value much more than the 2-3. I would expect this is due to the paired 7 not being very strong against more commonly played hands with higher average card value. (In other words, 7 doesn't mean as much when the average opponent has cards higher than a 7.)

[swang]

27 has high card value compared to 23 vs all other hands. Vs a hand someone would actually play, like JT, you don't have any high card value.

[soupboy]

Not a poker expert by far, but this could be because 2/3 can only participate in three straight draws (A2345,23456,34567) whereas 2/7 can be in seven straight hands. (A2345, 23456, 34567, 45678, 56789, 6789T, 789TJ)