So it snowie good for anything? It's funny how awesome it sounds on there site but then this thread ****s on it so bad lol

I tried the preflop advisor thing. I don't even know how I'd implement the strategy if I wanted to. For example how does one keep track of all the percentages they're at when they have to bet one hand 37% another 4% and another 15%.

Did pokersnowie lose to jungleman? I watched that vid but I don't recall them saying it lost in the end haha.

I was thinking of using poker snowie to help develop GTO but this threads making me skeptical now...

What do you think about the BB defense of Snowie ?

what opening size is that vs for the top 3? Is it 9 handed? how deep? What are your thoughts?

Hi,

I have a question about pokersnowie in this specific hand.

Basically if you plug this into pokersnowie it gives the advice on the river to always call a bet with our whole range even though I am always behind my opponent's range.

Can someone shed light on what's going on here?

Pokersnowie has a strategy . It can tell you in every spot the exact frequencies of hands which it folds/calls or raises . You can then see it's follow up strategy showing how it then plays it's whole range in response to opponent's actions

I find this pretty useful because a human coach could not do this very easily/quickly

I think you need to make your own judgements as to how "correct" it's ranges are but at least it's all easily available for you to examine . Then you can maybe incorporate some ideas into your own game and tweak some of your own ranges if some of snowie's play makes sense / seems correct to you

If you just try to copy snowie's play then a) you won't be able to get the frequencies right and b) it's not proven to be a winning strategy anyway

We're getting 3:1 on a call . Lots of straight draws missed . We block Tx . He's probably not value betting 8x . So overall we're getting too good a price to fold when his value range is quite small and there's a lot of potential missed draws that he bluffs with

EDIT : Sorry I guess I misunderstood the question . Idk why snowie puts his range like you posted but the above still applies imo

Thanks but I wasn't asking for an explanation of the river call.

I was asking for an explanation of why the PokerSnowie software for this hand advises that we call the river with a range that is 90%+ one pair hands when it thinks that the opponent only has a range of 2 pairs+ 95%+ of the time.

The usual answer would be that if we folded then the opponent could just bluff there more, but PokerSnowie litterally suggests to fold about 2% of the time with our marginal range on the river so it makes little sense.

Yes you may think of a reason to call, but PokerSnowie thinks that it's calling a bigger hand always.

Probably one of the thousands of apparent anomalies in Snowie's strategy due to a sample-size deficiency. There are just too many possibilities for the wide ranges BvB for Snowie to have accurately calculated the EV for every hand and every action sequence.
I used to get a buzz out of finding the weird anomalies, like when I "correctly" jammed the river with the second nut flush in a particular spot, only to find out the Snowie villain would only ever get to the river with the stone cold nuts.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. Most of the time, the advice seems pretty solid, and the AI gets better each time it's updated. I'm sure you'll find some other weirdness as you go along. When it was first launched, Snowie would sometimes fold AK to a 5-bet jam getting better than 2:1.
Cliffs: It's not perfect. It's just pretty good, but needs more training.

I see.

I know it's not going to be perfect but I would have thought it would get simple river decisions down. I mean those should be the easiest since there are no more cards to come!

The thing is that this isn't even a spot like your nuts vs 2nd nuts or the AK spot. This is literally PokerSnowie presenting two ranges that is equivalent to saying 'Player 1 has the 100% nuts and bets. Player 2 has 100% middle pair and should call every time'

It's in essence defying its own logic.

As I said before I've seen spots similar to this where it's only 50% call vs a range which is only 70% nuts or something, and I just assume that PokerSnowie thinks it still has to call in order to keep Villain honest.

But if you have PokerSnowie Pro I would suggest looking at this hand it's like no other spot. It's like if I showed PokerSnowie I had AA preflop it would still call with any two cards.

But Snowie doesn't "solve" poker in the same way as GTORB or pio or something like that. It just simulated trillions of hands and kept records of the results.
For a BvB pot where the board was 852TQ, hero had T9o and the action went bet-call/bet-call/check-bet-call it might only have a handful of example hands, and it's possible that T9o was a profitable call in those spots because the BB made a random bluff a couple of times.
It's not calling to "keep villain honest". It's calling because in its own database of a few specific action sequences, it found that calling was profitable. That same database could show that it's only profitable for the BB to bet with hands that beat one pair, because when it tested other hands, they didn't make money. It's kind of confusing, I know.

FWIW, part of the sample-size problem could be due to Snowie apparently learning that betting the flop with T9o was a mistake. Since it would have stopped making that mistake during its 'training', it wouldn't have extensive 'knowledge' on how to play the river after making it, so it's hardly surprising if it makes weird river choices if it gets there with a hand that shouldn't be in its range.

To clarify: Snowie is probably pretty close to optimal pre-flop, because it's been dealt every hand millions of times and then played millions of boards to find out an average EV. It's had AA UTG enough times to know that it's worth about 7bb in EV or whatever the figure is.
It's not going to be perfect on the river with T9o on 852QT, because it hasn't played that exact situation enough times to get an accurate EV.

After many months practicing with Snowie, I realize that I waste my time, now I am a worse player
I checked my DB and I found many profitable situations that I'm avoiding following the stupid advices of Snowie :@:@

I thought about that too and it's the best explanation I can find.

Still, the price of a subscription and the way the analysis features are sold make it out to be a decent analyzing software for your hands to see if you made mistakes in big pots. And where do the biggest pots occur? On the river!

It seems so silly because if this is what's going on ie. small sample size, then it means that you could do a perfectly viable strategy that deviates from PokerSnowie and it won't be able to analyse it for you. It's like going onto a forum for hand advice and some guy just says 'fold preflop'. It should be stated what the sample size is for the certain scenario if this is the problem.

I suppose that river spots can be analysed by humans pretty well in general if you have a good idea of what ranges look like so long term it won't be a make or break problem for PokerSnowie.

I sort of equate where we are now with poker software to where chess software was 25-30 years ago. You have to start somewhere.

Actually I just thought,

Even though it doesn't play T9 this way, it plays a ton of hands this way.

If you look on the hand advice, it just doesn't include T9o, but a ton of other hands.

Thus the sample size should be huge still for such a common spot (cb call, cb call, check bet)

Thus sample size isn't the problem for this clearly wrong hand advice!

So what is it!?

I think I might be on to something.

I put the hand into a new scenario where I do exactly the bet sizes PokerSnowie recommends. This time, the ranges seem very correct and well balanced.

So it seems that if you want to analyse your hands with PokerSnowie you have to use the half pot or pot sizings to be sure to get accurate analysis.

This is very annoying since as we all know betting 2/3 is the correct sizing in most scenarios.

I've found some more less absurd scenarios and it just looks like PokerSnowie plays weird on the river. I found another spot where the player should have 100% nuts on the river and the opponent should call with his range of nuts and less than nuts. And that's with all the correct bet sizings that it recommends.

I've tried to think how it can be justified but it just can't. It may have something to do with rolling over ranges from previous streets and then formulating a 1-a defending range, even if it ends up in such nonsense as what we're observing. But there's no reason why on the river the betting player can't just include some bluffs to balance. Something to do with the checking range taking preference in the programming or something.

I just have no clue, all I know is that PokerSnowie is just getting these spots totally wrong.

And as I've said before, river spots are easier to assess for humans, so it's easier for us to spot these things. Just think about the flop advice it's giving that might be totally stupid but we just can't tell.

One thing I will grant PokerSnowie is that it does make you think about different strategies even if it does weird things.

Maybe it's allowing opponent to have a range which isn't the same as snowie's would be . Which is obviously totally practical since no opponent has the same ranges as Snowie
Like you said some sort of minimum defense frequency on the river

Snowie doesn't understand the concept of "1- alpha" or "minimum defence frequency", nor should it, because MDF is not GTO. (See multiple posts about this in the theory forum).
Snowie doesn't try to prevent its opponent from making money. It built its ranges by trying to maximise its own EV, and it learned to do that by trial and error, until it had a list of hands that are or aren't profitable in situation X/Y/Z. Sometimes that means check-folding the river at what looks like an "exploitable frequency". Sometimes it means hero-calling with king high.
Snowie doesn't care about 'theory', as such. It makes bets and calls because they were profitable when it did them while training. If you take "weird" lines with "weird" hands, it will often make what look like "weird" river decisions, possibly because it lacks the training for those weird situations. I mean, there are more possibilities in NLH holdem than there are atoms in the universe, so you can't seriously expect Snowie to know the optimal play for every single one. (Although the initial advertising for the software might have given this indication!)
Non-standard bet-sizes also confuse it. An early version of Snowie could be exploited by minbetting, because the "Snowie brain" treated that bet-size the same as it would a 1/2 pot bet, so it would fold to a minbet way more often than anyone with a human brain would.

There are definitely anomalies in its river ranges, which are most likely due to sample-size problems, but it's not like it happens every hand.
It used to frequently do weird/bad stuff on the flop too, like folding a ten-high flopped flush (but calling with a 9-high flush) on some boards, perhaps because - during its initial training - every time T8s flopped a flush on a certain board, it ran into a better hand, which made the engine think that T8s should be folded in that spot. It's only from playing hundreds of millions more hands that it can correct the mistake.

If you spot some really bad mistakes/anomalies, the support team might be interested. I have no idea if/when the AI is going to be updated, but you can always email and ask.

Arty, you strike me as someone ho has used Snowie quite extensively.

How much do you feel it has advanced your game?

Feel free to PM me if this answer gets lengthy btw, i'd be pretty interested to hear.

Arty pretty much spot on about this. Snowie isn't trying to play perfectly against the ranges that it would have in opponents shoes (confusing, I know, since you can ask it what it villains range is - but it's merely telling you what it would have had in that situation). Snowie's ranges are, according to them, designed by first playing against itself and then playing against 'exploitative agents' - so the ranges should be picked in some way by their highest EV across the range of opponent strategies it has trained against... If you believe their marketing.

I used it "a lot" for one year and - along with Janda's book in particular - it completely changed my way of thinking about the game. Before I subscribed, I was a typical ABC nitreg that had "standard" pre-flop ranges, and I played somewhat fit or fold according to the strength of my hand. Now I'm much more interested in ranges, and I have more awareness of things like blockers and mixed strategies, and how to realize equity; concepts which had never really occurred to me before. (Snowie doesn't explain the concepts unfortunately. It just produces 'scary' lists of combos, so you need to learn some theory to make any kind of sense of them.)
Using Snowie didn't necessarily improve my winrate by a huge amount, but I think about and play the game pretty differently to the way I did a year ago. It's the kind of software (like any of the modern tools - CREV, GTORB etc) that only really benefits the user if you devote considerable study time to it. For many newbies, I think the initial reaction to seeing the post-flop range recommendations is "WTF?" because the lists seem incredibly complex. It certainly took me a while before I could discern any sort of patterns that really helped my game, and I'm still far from sure what I'm doing most of the time!

I'm thinking of those pesky exploitive agents.

There are many more possible exploitive agents that bluff too much compared with those that don't bluff the river enough on the spectrum of bluffing agents with <pot sized bets.

0% bluff-----indifference----50% bluff------------------100% bluff

Not to scale but the point where the in position player is indifferent between checking back, which is likely +ev for even his worst hands,* and bluffing with the bottom of its range, will usually be somewhere around there imo.

*Because the small blind can have bluffs, while the flop and turn have strengthened the bottom of the big blinds range.

If the small blind correctly gives up on some bluffs on the river, then the worst of the big blinds bluffcatchers are likely to show a decent profit by checking the river. If Snowie doesn't bluff this river ever, then the small blind will be making -ev calls with at least part of his range. However, by playing the exploitive agents in the small blind's shoes, which are more numerous to the right of the indifference point shown above, Snowie learned that it should check call this river with 100% of its range because it's the most +ev line.

So we see this conundrum not because Snowie is bad at poker, but instead because of those silly exploitive agents.

Of course in real poker you will do better (win more or lose less) with your KK calls than your JJ calls as there is no law that says your opponents can not bet JJ or QQ into you sometimes, and they will.

........


If you or Snowie thought these were the proper calling percentages (and lets pretend they are) for this group of three hands- JJ, QQ and KK- it would make more sense to call 100 percent of the time with the top two hands and a far lesser percentage with the third and weakest hand, JJ. Of course making sure that the total calling percentage for the group is what you had calculated it should be.

And I am not saying you should look at these three hands GTO-wise as a group, as you should not.

Finally got around to downloading the months trial of Snowie and I've just had a quick look so far at some of the basic information it has. I've got a few days off work next week so was planning on playing around with it. Other than generally going over all the 'errors' for hands I've uploaded as there any specific areas that users of snowie would recommend I would get the most value from looking at? I play FR if that makes any difference.

From my experience Snowy is good for finding some fancy lines where you can take down the pot and fold out opponents range postflop. It sometimes can surprise you and suggest an interesting play which is more profitable than you normally would do there.