Poker Software and Analysis

Introduction

In Poker literature, for the pre flop betting round, players are generally recommended to play fewer hands early on and to loosen up later on.

This is because the earlier players have more players to beat. For example, on a 9 handed table, the first player to act has 8 random hands to beat. Whereas if the action is folded to the dealer button, the player only has 2 remaining players to beat.

With regards to raising pre-flop, it is again generally advised to be more cautious early on, and to do more later on. If the pre flop action gets folded round to the cutoff or dealer button, the players might raise with the intention of stealing the blinds.

Using the data from Poker FTP, I shall perform some tests to see if these commonly made recommendations are accepted by the online Poker community.

The Tests

I shall measure the percentage of players who either call, raise or fold when the pre flop action is folded to them. Based on common Poker literature, this percentage should increase as more players fold and the action moves round the table.

I have chosen to only include data where the action has been folded, as callers and raisers will influence the behaviour of those after them on a non consistent basis (i.e. raise amounts are not consistent, and the number of callers could be differet for each player).

The test data is for No Limit Holdem, and shall be grouped by limit.

All results are for 9 seat tables where 9 active players are present.

Results

The charts to the right show the results of the test data. The number 2 position represents the first person to act (also known as Under The Gun, or UTG). The number 8 position represents the dealer button.

With the exception of the $10/$20 and $25 /$50 tables, it appears that players do tend to act more as the the action is folded round to them.

This shows that, on the whole, players do tend to follow the conventional literature.

Two other interesting characterstics also jump out at me:

• For the Calling results, players from the lower limits consistently call more than players from the higher limits.
• For the Raising results, players from the higher limits consistently raise more than those from the lower limits.

This shows that players at the higher limits tend to be tighter and more aggressive than those from the lower limits.

This evidence could suggest that players at the higher limits are more educated in terms of Poker literature. Books state that tight-aggressive play is a key part of a winning strategy.

Note, however, that these results do not mean that players at higher limits are better players. Poker is a zero sum game, so for every dollar won, another is lost. There are winners and losers at every level.

Potential Test Issues

The results are grouped by blind level and take no account of individual players. There is a possibility that serious players (those who've played more hands) will skew the results. i.e. Perhaps it is a minority of players at the higher limits who are tighter and more aggressive. A modification of this test could be to average the statistics on a player level, rather than purely by position. However, I'd probably need more data to do so.

Regarding the unusual results for the $10/$20 and $25/$50 tables, I only had limited sample sizes - just under 100 hands for each of the $25/$50 results. This is because the test has only been run against the sample data (which is still quite large for the lower limits). I shall attempt to have the script run against a larger dataset before drawing further conclusions.