I've upgraded all situations to have weighted ranges. This is to make them more realistic by making more holdings possible, and was requested by many people. It also allows you to practice playing those hands that would normally not be in your range (for example preflop slowplays).

Unfortunately, this makes the mouse-over range text unwieldy. That's something I'll have to improve later, probably with a graphical representation, like PokerStove but with with the weights displayed by shading the various hands. In the mean time, the situation description contains a broken down description of each player's range. For example, here's the description of BTN's range for 3betting MP:

• BTN always plays: JJ+,AQs+,AKo
• BTN usually plays: TT,KTs,QTs,J9s,T8s,97s,76s,65s,AQo
• BTN occasionally plays: 99-88,AJs,A5s-A2s,KJs+,QJs,JTs,T9s,98s,86s+,75s,54s,KJo+,QJo

The current situations include (mostly flop situations):

• CO open vs. BB call
• MP open vs. BTN call
• MP faces BTN on a dry board
• MP faces BTN on a wet board
• BB 3bet vs. CO call
• BTN 3bet vs. MP call
• BTN isoraise vs. MP limp/call
• BTN 3bet vs. UTG and MP calls (three-player)
• BB 3bet vs. CO and SB calls (three-player)
• MP open vs. BTN and BB calls (three-player)
• UTG open vs. MP and BTN calls (three-player)
• Heads-up, preflop
• BTN open vs. BB defend (Limit Hold'em)
• BTN 3bet vs. CO call (Limit Hold'em)
• SB caps vs. CO open, BTN 3bet (Limit Hold'em, three-player)

There's also a new client, with 4-color deck provided by nastyhabit.

ive read your reply a few times and it keeps coming up in my thoughts so i guess i should reply.

this paragraph has me flip flopping.

can you give me an example of what you mean so i can better wrap my head around this?

Okay, I'm really making two points there:

1. If you consider only your equity, you will make yourself exploitable (or at least, play sub-optimally)
2. You must consider your own range

Point 1

In its simplest form is kind of obvious. For example, against a range of {22+,A2s+,KTs+,QTs+,JTs,T9s,98s,87s,76s,65s,54s,AT o+,KJo+} on a board of Jh Ts 6s (let's just say Villain is cbetting his entire range), you're much better off continuing with 62o than 77, though you have 43.5% equity with either hand.

You're probably going to fold either hand to a bet on the turn, but 62o has at least two advantages, strategically:

• With 62o you're more likely to improve and not have to fold the turn (you have 5 outs, whereas 77 has only 2)
• Even if you miss the turn, if Villain checks the turn, 62o is a better hand to try to take down the pot with, because it has semibluff potential. If your turn bet is called, you're more likely to end up with the winning hand holding 62o than holding 77.

But actually, that's only part of the point. Really, the problem of using equity as a guide to your play is that it encourages you to play your hand face up. Ask me if you want a more in-depth explanation of that, and I'll see if I can come up with something more general, or look at how we might play our range exploitably, or something.

Point 2

I'm going to explain this with an example that came up when I was playing on Range vs. Range. (For the record, here's the hand log, and here's the chat log for this session.)

The scenario that unfolded was:

• I was (nominally) in MP, I'd opened preflop with a range of {66+,A2s+,KTs+,QTs+,J9s+,T9s,ATo+,KJo+}.
• I actually had Ah 7h.
• Villain was (nominally) BTN, and called my opening raise.
• The flop was 7c 3d 2s.
• The pot was 15, and I cbet 15, a pot sized bet.
• Villain raised to 35.
• I called the flop raise.
• The turn was 4d.
• I checked turn.
• Villain bet 58 on a pot of 85.
• I folded.

Now before I go any further, ask yourself if you would fold on the turn. You're out of position, hit top pair on a 7-high flop, with an ace kicker, cbet, got raised, called, checked the turn, and now you face another bet. It really seemed like a fold, intuitively.

But analysis showed that if I'm folding A7 and worse on that turn, I'm exploitable. The reason is, I'm folding too much of my range. Which means I'm folding too often.

We estimated that I was probably cbetting approximately 100% of my range on the flop. That's 15.5% of hands total. If I fold A7 to the flop raise, I'm leaving myself with only 3.6% of hands total. So I'm folding something like 4/5 of the time. Which is obviously weak tight, so I have to play on with A7. Doing the maths, I should continue with about 8% of hands total on the flop if I don't want to be exploitable to BTN bluffing any two cards.

On the turn, I need to continue with 4.2% of hands total, or more to be unexploitable by bluffing. 4.1% would be keeping 66 in and folding everything worse. So I should have called with A7 there.

Do you see? You can only do this analysis if you know your own range. In fact, Villain's range didn't come into this calculation! It's actually less relevant than our own range here. (The only exception is that if we're behind even when Villain does bet or raise 100% of his hands, then we need to recognise that and fold even though that means all of his bluffs are profitable).

I know that wasn't a full explanation, but if you want to discuss in more depth, we probably ought to move this to the theory forum.

thumbsup,will check it out

Hi,

Whenever I click on create a new account, both the black box and the client window closes. I tried turning off the firewall, but it doesn't work.

I get this error message : 10:59:02 Debug: src/helpers.cpp<140>: 'CreateActCtx' failed with error 0x00000002 <the system cannont find the file specified.>.

I get a similar thing in that console window:

But it's not an error for most users. I think this happens for everyone, and hasn't caused any problems until now. It's an issue when using the wxPython library with py2exe, which I use to turn the python scripts into an executable.

It looks like I'll have to dig deeper now. Can you give me any information that might help? Like how your setup might be different from other users? E.g.

• Windows version?
• Are you running it as a restricted user account, or as an administrator?
• What crashes it and what doesn't? Can you enter a username, for example? Is clicking "New user" the only thing that crashes it?
• Anything else you can think of that might help me.

Hey man,

Cool software! Played a session with a friend yesterday and we thought it was a good tool and could be extremely useful once it has a few more features. A few suggestions we had were

-ability to save/resume sessions
-information on line frequencies
-an optional pane which shows hand type frequencies and/or combos (ala flopzilla)
-better notification when the action is on you (we chat on skype while playing so the action doesnt flow super fast and sometimes it's hard to tell when it's on you)
-ability to save/replay hands easily
-showdown and nsd winnings for each player

A lot of that could also be leveraged if you had a hand history file like stars that could be imported into HEM. A ton of stats/filters/info could be leveraged this way and it could save you a ton of work. (Credit to friend for idea) Anyways that's about it for now, only played one session tho so may have more suggestions in the future, hopefully it's not too much

Hi, would love to use the software but I cannot open the program? I have downloaded the software but cannot seem to be able to open it!

See below. Where / what do I click to open?


picture hosting

You need to extract the files to a local folder. (You appear to be trying to run it from inside the zip file.)

Also, you need to run client.exe. (You appear to be trying to run w9xpopen.exe, which is needed only for backwards compatibility with Windows 98, Windows 95 and Windows ME.)

Does that help?

Great - thanks

Let me congratulate you on your very cool software! I would love it if you could add a scenario for BB or SB 3bet vs BTN call.

Maybe even 2 scenarios of BB 3b vs BTN call one with tight ranges, and one with considerably looser ones. This is an area I would love to practice more.

Thank you . Please tell your friends. The main problem with the software at the moment is that nobody knows about it!

Well, basically this situation already exists:
What's the difference between this situation and BB 3bet vs. BTN call, or SB 3bet vs. BTN call (which are the two you asked for)? Mostly the name. But you might think that CO's calling range is too narrow (in practice, a BTN calling range should be wider than a CO calling range). And it might be that BB's 3bet range is too polarised - that BB would 3bet some medium-strength hands against BTN's wider range that he wouldn't against CO's slightly narrower one.

Tell me what ranges you'd like, and I'll consider creating a new situation.

The current situation has the following ranges. BB 3bets as follows:

• JJ+,AKs,AKo he 3bets all the time,
• TT,AQs-AJs he 3bets half the time,
• 99-22,ATs-A2s,K9s+,Q9s+,J8s+,T8s+,97s+,86s+,75s+,64s+,54s,AQ o-AJo,KJo+,QJo he 3bets one time in six.

CO calls as follows:

• JJ-77,AQs-AJs,KQs,AQo he calls all the time,
• 66-55,ATs,KJs,QJs,AJo,KQo he calls half the time,
• QQ+,44-22,A7s+,KTs,QTs,JTs,T9s,98s,87s,76s,65s,54s,AKo,AT o,KJo-KTo,QJo he calls one time in four.

And you're right, this is a really good situation to practice. It's probably the hardest / least straightforward situation so far. The pot is big, BB seems to have an initiative advantage, but both players are fairly far from being pot committed. (In fact, somewhat surprisingly, over the 510 hands played in this situation so far on Range vs. Range, BB is 3 big blinds better off than CO! Though I wonder if it's just that CO is overplaying his hand.)

Just wanted to clarify here: I mean 3 big blinds per hand. The pot at the flop is 20.5 big blinds. BB wins on average 17.75 big blinds of that. That's 1,530 big blinds, or 15 buy-ins total.

hey guyupstairs,

Just wanted to leave some issues i've found with the app:

• When starting and trying to get server info, the application doesn't show any thing, it should inform us what it is doing. Confused me a bit at start
• I was having some web problems (lag) and tried to get into a room, i double clicked the situation and since that didn't work i clicked join twice . The app crashed beautifully
• I received a timeout messagebox but the application screen didn't clear neither did it have a button to reconnect. When i tried joining a random room it crashed.

Thanks. I really appreciate the feedback.

You've stumbled on the part of the software that probably needs the most work: reliability features. That's because I focus my limited attention where I think it can make the most difference.

That said, the more people raise things like these, the more I consider that they need fixing. When you have as few resources as I do, it's definitely a case of the squeaky wheel getting the oil.

To get to the specifics:

• I agree that it needs a splash screen, or loading page. I think that's something I can do fairly cheaply, so I probably will soon.
• I tried to get my app to crash like you said, but it just gave me the "unable to join table" message (meaning I've already joined the table). But I'll keep looking into this bug. I agree that the software should cope with poor connections. (Up to the limit where it considers you disconnected, which is currently 1 minutes.)
• I agree that the behavior when you do timeout is pretty darn poor. I'll definitely work on that (although it affects very few people), because it is a turn-off.