Long Ball Poker

Author: Simon Dexter

A number of years ago, an English football coach named Charles Hughes wrote a book about football tactics and skills in which he revealed that 85% of goals come following five passes or less. At the time, Hughes’ findings were deemed to represent an incredible breakthrough; years of statistical evidence seemed to support his statistical case and subsequently, the dreaded long-ball game was born.

Players at a number football clubs were duly encouraged by coaches who had been persuaded by Hughes’ evidence to get the ball forward as quickly as possible, by-passing midfield and hitting speculative passes into space. Occasionally, this tactic worked, but it did nothing to improve playing technique, yet Hughes rose to become the FA’s coaching director. Furthermore, whenever English advocates of Hughes’ system ventured into Europe the tactic proved less than useless, which suggested that whatever the stats might say, there was no substitute for the sort of technical know-how displayed by their continental counterparts.

In time, the long-ball game became known as ‘The English Disease’ one which, as we have seen over the past week of Euro 2008 qualifying matches, has mutated and now ensures that the international side has enormous difficulty breaking even the weakest opponents down.

Given poker’s overt mathematical bias, it’s the type of game which lends itself to statistical analysis; players are constantly using mental arithmetic to calculate pot odds, or to establish the probability of holding better cards than their opponents or the chances of someone folding. So it’s not surprising that, in the wake of the online poker boom, several companies have produced computer software which is designed, they say, to improve your chances of winning. While many question the validity of such claims, there appears little doubt that such programs cannot make you a better poker player.

The programs on offer can do most things expected of a decent statistically-based product, from logging your playing records to suggesting how to play each hand. In fairness, few, if any, claim to be replacements for understanding solid poker strategy, but it is easy to see how players could become dependent upon them, irrespective of the fact that they do not teach playing technique.

The market leader is promoted with a catchy “Get the edge by knowing the odds” slogan designed for what might be called ‘long-ball poker players’ (LBPP).

Once installed, it monitors each game in progress, analyses which cards are dealt and how your opponents are playing, ie it tries to establish how predictable they are – computers cannot deal with unpredictability. As you’re playing online, in a separate small screen on your PC monitor, it displays statistics, odds and advice about what your next move should be. Charles Hughes would have been in his element, but the program goes further, calculating the odds of you winning a particular hand and even, using a “proprietary predictive algorithm”, determining the probability of beating your opponents in a showdown.

The scope of such programs is undoubtedly impressive, displaying as they do your ‘outs’, i.e. the number of cards that could improve your hand and ‘total outs’, i.e. cards that would improve your hand without benefiting any of your opponents. As a game progresses, most of the statistically-based software currently available to LBPPs also notes who has folded and when, a feature which allows it to subsequently predict what cards were binned, based upon the community cards displayed at the time.

Such software is perfectly legal: indeed, most programmers are anxious to let would-be buyers know that their product is not playing the game for you, merely advising upon various arithmetic elements of it. Furthermore, much of the software is compatible with dozens of well-known poker rooms, the owners of which tend to frown upon both collusion between players and other computer programs known as ‘bots’ which are designed to play online poker without any user guidance. Since the player with a legal computer program continues to make his own decisions, its use is acceptable.

But ultimately, we’re talking about a computer program here. Software cannot give a feel for the game of poker, nor interpret a bluff or a ‘tell’, nor is it much good in tournament play. Remember, when Charles Hughes’ football statistics were exposed to the wider world, they were found wanting; players relying too much on computer programs to play poker could find themselves similarly exposed and their bankroll suddenly woefully short.

Tags: Charles Hughes, poker guru, poker history, Poker tells, professional poker, Theory of Poker

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 28th, 2007 at 10:44 am and is filed under Poker Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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