{"id":140,"date":"2011-02-10T20:31:20","date_gmt":"2011-02-11T04:31:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/?p=140"},"modified":"2011-02-10T20:31:20","modified_gmt":"2011-02-11T04:31:20","slug":"the-internet-hand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/?p=140","title":{"rendered":"The Internet Hand"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the last couple of live games I’ve participated in, the “computer” or “internet” hand<\/a> of Q7o<\/strong> has been mentioned. The pokerterms.com definition discounts the idea that the conventional explanation that a simulation showed it was the hand with the smallest positive win rate in heads-up play of the 169 hand combinations. In their section “Real Statistics,” they claim that Poker Stove<\/a> shows Q2s<\/strong> and Q5o<\/strong> between Q7o<\/strong> and the 50% mark and that J5s<\/strong> is just under the mark.<\/p>\n

I hate to differ with the venerable Poker Stove but I have my own sets of statistics, run for between two to twelve players. Each set is based on 500,000 hands of No-Limit Hold’Em. And the conventional explanation is right. Q7o will be the best hand 50.56% of the time in a two-player game. I don’t know what pokerterms.com was feeding their copy of Poker Stove but Q2s<\/strong> only wins 47.74% heads-up and Q5o<\/strong> is 48.51%. J5s<\/strong> is 47.35%, also on the down side.<\/p>\n

Of course, that’s not the entire story. Poker isn’t just a binary win\/lose proposition. There’s always the possibility of a tie, and some hands have relatively high possibilities of doing so. While a hand like AA<\/strong> will only tie 0.42% of its appearances, J5s<\/strong> will tie 5.13% of the times it shows up.<\/p>\n

One way to evaluate a hand’s strength isn’t how often it wins but how often it doesn’t lose. If I don’t lose any chips, if I can split whatever other money might be in the pot, that’s acceptable. On that basis, Q7o<\/strong> looks marginally better. I wouldn’t normally play it, but in a brute-force statistical race, it only loses 46.02% of the time. It’s in the top 40% of possible hands, ranked on how often they lose. If you look at the range between a hand that loses 50% of the time heads-up (J6o<\/strong> loses 50.05%) and the best possible hand pre-flop (AA<\/strong> loses 14.02%), Q7o<\/strong> rates 11% better than statistical average. Q2s<\/strong> is at 5%, Q5o<\/strong> is 6%, and J5s<\/strong> is 7%.<\/p>\n

Lots of ways to slice and dice statistics. Just a matter of making them useful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the last couple of live games I’ve participated in, the “computer” or “internet” hand of Q7o has been mentioned. The pokerterms.com definition discounts the idea that the conventional explanation that a simulation showed it was the hand with the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_eb_attr":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[79,80,11],"class_list":["post-140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-poker","tag-computer-hand","tag-internet-hand","tag-odds-calculator"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1t0pn-2g","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}