What stops an online player from using a subsidiary poker playing program to help him out?
Would kings full of aces vs. 4 kings count as a bad beat? (The flop was three kings and I was the guy with the case king.)
Nearly all the people who earn(ed) their living playing online poker use programs like PokerTracker.
In most places the rule is that both hole cards must play to win the bad beat jackpot. Unless you had the other Ace in your hand, you had four Kings and the Ace on the board is considered to be your five card hand. Both of your hole cards don’t play, so no jackpot. (No, you can’t say your hand was four Kings with a Jack.)
What kind of rules are there—generally—for having smart phones, tablets, headphone etc. at the table?
This varies from casino to casino; there is no consistency at all. In some places you can wear your ear buds and listen to tunes, and in some places the use of such devices is strictly forbidden at the table. In some places you can make calls or text if you just step away, in some you have to leave the poker room. It depends.
In my honest opinion only a fool would listen to his music at the table.
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What stops an online player from using a subsidiary poker playing program to help him out?
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Depends what you mean.
There is no rule against using Poker Tracker or similar programs that simply gather information you could theoretically gather yourself. There ARE rules against using bots that actually play for you. How they would stop you from doing so I really do not know.
I was thinking more in terms of cheating. I have read about people who cheated at chess tournaments by using headphones to communicate with someone feeding them moves—ostensibly from a computer.
I could also see someone developing a poker app to be used on an Android device.
I’m not trying to develop my own cheating strategy; just curious. I know that casinos take cheating very seriously, but people still do it.
While this is possible, is strikes me as being unlikely and really not something to worry about. I’m having trouble understanding the logistics that would help two people cheat a poker table. A computer would be of very little help (unlike chess.)
Cheating at poker is usually players at the same table cooperating. Collusion IS a problem sometimes but you can usually smell it and it’s easy to just get up and walk away.
If you want to try some live poker, really, your concerns here are pretty trivial things. A legitimate casino will run a pretty honest game and the players you find at small stakes tables are not card sharks and cheats; the stakes aren’t big enough for those types. You will find a mix of beginners with a decent grasp of basics (e.g. me) some reasonably good players, and a lot of people who just like cards and gambling and who will pay you off if you learn the fundamentals.
As a beginner, the most significant threat to your money is not cheaters, rakes, session fees or whatnot; it’s you making fundamental errors, which will almost certainly be one or all of three things:
- Calling with too many marginal hands preflop,
- Not understanding the basic probabilities, and
- Playing in too complicated a fashion (“Fancy Play Syndrome,” as named by Mike Caro) rather than simply playing straightforward poker.
emphasis mine
I’m not sure why I get the feeling that you and I are communicating at cross-purposes.
I’m not particularly worried that people will be cheating (in my previous post I was hoping to avoid giving the impression that I was working up a plan to cheat).
You mentioned in your first post that people use software. If it helps online, I thought it might help in a casino, but maybe your point is that software helps when one is playing numerous tables.
I was just curious. I’m not so much concerned by any of the things you mentioned (except possibly making math errors or getting caught counting on my fingers).
I’ll admit I don’t want to look foolish by missing a blind or forgetting to announce my raise on something like the one chip rule. And I get the feeling from this thread that there is a lot of animosity toward newer players.
At this point, I’m mostly concerned that sitting around a table with a bunch of poker players will suck ass! Even if I happen to win.
The software is primarily to assist with data mining. With it, a player can keep track of the stuff I mentioned in my second post in this thread: how often a player voluntarily puts money into the pot, how aggressive they are, how often they 3-bet (re-raise), fold to 3-bets, make continuation bets (c-bets), fold to c-bets, how often they win at showdown, and lots more stats. IOW, all of the stuff you should be watching for when you observe players at your table. You should be able, with practice, to keep track of a lot of this stuff w/o software: the pace of live play is much slower than online, and you aren’t multi-tabling live.
Help me out on this, Rick, Turble, but doesn’t HEM, etc, also have stats on players from their previous play at a particular site, even if you have never seen them before? Or is it just from the hands you’ve watched them play, even if those hands come from different sessions? Or is it that people purchase hand histories, and feed those into whatever software they use? I’ve never used a HUD, so I’m a little hazy on how they work.
I can see an equity calculator being of use, especially in a game like Omaha. Or an ICM calculator in a tournament when you’re trying to figure out push/fold ranges. And I’d call both of the above cheating.
I’m not sure why you feel that there is animosity towards newer players. I’d think it’s rather the opposite: they want newer players because newer players usually aren’t very good, and the object of the game for most players is to make money. Now, if you’re holding up the game, by not paying attention to when it’s your turn or how much the bet to you is, being unclear about your action, acting out of order, taking forever to make a mundane decision, etc… that can get people mad. But you can avoid that by just paying attention. If they are irritated towards new players, that’s not very smart of them. If you get angry at their poor attitude, then you and your stack of chips might decide to leave the game, and the regs will be stuck playing each other. So I don’t think that usually happens.
It’s been awhile since I’ve played live, and though it was at times nerve-wracking, I didn’t think it sucked ass. YMMV, of course, and it was always recreation, never how I made my living. The easiest way to find out whether you will like it or not is to go play. Let us know how it goes.
Because online poker and live poker are very, very different. What we say about one is not true of the other. People can cheat online by playing a vast number of tables and using software to mine information and run the table for them.
Without getting into a lot of poker strategy talk, what robot and data mining programs allow a cheater to do online is play many tables with an extremely tight approach, entering no pots unless one has a very, very strong hand. If you can play 24 tables at once it doesn’t matter if you just make two bucks an hour per table, you make a good profit at that. The unfortunate side effect is that cash games on sites like Pokerstars are unplayably tight and boring.
In real life you can’t play 24 tables at once or get a computer program to fold your junk hands for you. You’ve got to sit there, look at your J-6 offsuit, wait for your turn, and then toss it into the muck. Anyway, a super tight strategy simply isn’t the profit-maximizing choice at one table. You’d be bored to tears and would be grinding out less money per hour than minimum wage, plus all the human players you’re up against would realize what you’re doing and simply refuse to call your bets.
Software like Poker Tracker (which is allowed, and not considered cheating) helps keep track of what you’re doing and what other players do, but in real life you just couldn’t gather the info that fast.
At least in real life, there’s no animosity towards newer players. Even little mistakes aren’t a big deal.
Trust me, the major irritants in real life are
- Assholes, and
- Whiners.
There is nothing, nothing worse at a poker table than a guy who can’t shut up about his bad luck and starts blaming the dealer, or the autoshuffler, or the cards, or the seat. He’ll complain that he can’t win in Position 2 so he moves to Position 6, and then he loses there and bitches that it’s the cards and demands a deck change, as if those 52 cards are any different from the last 52. Then that doesn’t work so he starts moaning about how his last six weeks he can’t catch a break. Then he blames the dealer. He slams his cards down on the table. Oh, and then the bad beat stories begin - the cracked aces, the cracked kings, he absolutely NEVER wins with AK, blah blah blah, the laws of probability do not apply to him. Come on in and make newbie mistakes. Believe me, you will not be 1/10000000000th as infuriating as the assholes and whiners.
But that said, they’re rare. For the most part poker players are there to have fun, and there’s usually laughs, free drinks, and the game itself is SO FUN in person, you have no idea. It’s ten times more fun in person.
It may well be me.
I will
Oh, and SiX, you should really check out the Dope’s weekly poker tournament. Not sure what they’re calling it this quarter. Work’s keeping me away, so I haven’t been able to join in the fun for awhile. Play money, but it’s taken seriously.
Decent group of people. I think you’d enjoy it.
I stumbled on that yesterday and was in the process of signing up.
Heh, RickJay, I read your point #2 in your last post as “winners”. They’re generally pretty annoying, too :).
I thought the only place where you could legally play poker online for real money is Nevada. Maybe a couple of other states as well. Can you play legally in another country or state even if it’s illegal to pla in the state you live in (i.e., the laws are only aimed at people who run poker games, not the players?) Or are the laws just difficult to enforce?
I recently received my copy of Getting Started In Hold 'Em and I wanted to say a couple of things:
It is a good book (I’m only through about the first chapter though…).
I HIGHLY recommend Zynga Poker (no, I’m not a shill). Much of what is discussed in the book has to do with, for example; reading the board, and finding the “nuts”—I hate jargon, but I realize that many already know what that means… I did not, so if you want my take on what that means just ask. There are also ideas such as: A hand using both hole cards is stronger than a hand using one (so a Full House may or may not be a good hand).
Zynga allows you to watch hundreds of hands for free! You can fold every hand… you can simply watch hands being played… FOR FREE. And if you do play, where else can you call a $10.5K bet (or a $150 bet, or even a $15 bet) just to see if your Ks and Qs really lose to the “nuts” straight??
There are a lot of really expensive lessons to be learned in poker. And even though some people on Zynga (I’m sure there are other sites like it…) are playing maniac games—going all-in pre-flop on a 7 2 off-suit—others are playing tight games, and I can see that they know what they’re doing. Better to learn a lesson—or test your chops—where the scars are measured in pixels rather than in cash money.
More to the point, it’s a great way practice reading the board, and finding the “nuts,” and just having hand after hand dealt for you, and for having a place to watch a wide variety of players play their game in front of you for FREE.
If you know how to play the game, no doubt it’s a bore. But if you are trying to learn some basic lessons, better to play at a site like Zynga than to either spend time dealing hands to yourself or to lose even a dime playing elsewhere.
YMMV