At zoom 100-500 there are 35-40 "players" from Montenegro all playin the same style. Someone postet a list in the stars regulars thread some month ago.
Stars prevents them from sitting at the same zoom table.

"Stars prevent them from sitting at the same zoom table".

Well, they want to prevent collusion. What's the link with snowie ?

http://www.pokersnowie.com/about/pok...timonials.html

Zeljko plays zoom 500. The other "players" from Montenegro playin the same style. So i guess it's pretty clear what's going on.

Any source not coming from snowie's official website ?

I've been looking at the 2013 stars thread and most people seem to think there are indeed guys from montenegro playing stakes up to 500nl and training with snowie. Haven't found any reliable source though, but most importantly I haven't seen many graphs to back up their results. We'd need before/after snowie training graphs of course.

Some people also suggested that these guys were staked by snowie. If snowie can invest that much money, I don't see why they couldn't give them real coaching lessons to make them improve instead of just giving them their software.

Anyway, with such a lack of information, and seeing that many 2+2 users seem to easily outplay snowie (small samples though), there aren't many facts going in snowie's favor so far.

Don't know what you want to hear. Sure, there are other bots beside snowie that can beat 5/10+.
Today there are 35 "players" from Montenegro, tomorrow maybe 350. Who knows. It's simply a question of time until they beat zoom 500.

with the help of 2+2 they will make it. ^^

Their preflop sizing is unique and that's how you can spot them. TeamLeader29 even played 1000nl zoom but has moved down to 500 again.
Based on what I know they are not winning though.

Since each of them is better than a fish them never playing on the same table raises their chances of encountering fish.
I have no idea how big that effect is but its certainly not zero.
The effect gets bigger the more snowie players play the same zoom pool at the same time and the smaller the pool is.

If i was a zoom 500 reg the idea of 10% or however much of my pool being guys i only slightly beat that have the luxury of never playing each other then i wouldn't be very happy about that.

Just to make it clear. If they were 10% of the pool 30% were fish and the remaining 60% were other regs then their effective pool of opponents has 33.3% fish while yours only has 30%.

sent from phone

Can you name one of these bots ? Do you have any proof that it is able to beat any stake ?

I can't find much info on Alberta CPRG's websites or on computer bot competitions (or 3 years old info).

Nowadays if there were actually some strong bots online, we should be able to find copies of them and test their level of play extensively (like we do with chess programs).

Exameter: I'm not saying what stars is doing is right, and I agree with your reasoning. I'm just saying this has nothing to do with snowie and doesn't prove anything.

It's common sense dude. Obv you don't play these limits.

Absolutely not. If somebody developed a bot this strong he would use to get rich and never show it to anybody.

Dont believe we're disagreeing here. I don't think that those guys use snowie while playing.


sent from phone

I don't even play on international rooms (not allowed in my dumb country).
Still, I'm surprised that common sense stuff cannot be proven.

That might be true, the best poker bots might be hidden from the public, though I believe research institutes such as the CPRG should have bots of decent and comparable level.
And IIRC there are money prizes in most poker bot competitions, so we should at least have a rough idea of what a modern bot is capable of, even though these may not be the absolute best in the world.

I agree that we agree on this.

Blinds 1/2, players 100bb deep. BTN opens for $4, SB folds, BB calls. Flop A82r. BB checks, BTN minbets ($2 into $9 pot) and snowie says that BB has to fold 44%, call 45,26% and raise 10,74%.

Could it be that snowie only recognizes bet sizes of 1/2 pot, pot, and 2x pot when bet into? So maybe with the min bet snowie sees this as 1/2 pot. This may explain some of it but not sure. Just a thought.

Against 1/2 pot bet in the same situation it folds 58,61%.

Does snowie make any assumptions about opponents ranges, based on its own frequencies for similar spots, or its just trying to play in a manner that's unexploitable?

From their Facebook page:

[tldr; snowie = scam (at best) - don't buy it, don't help them]

Hello to all,

I know I don't post much in here (like almost never) but I came across a situation I think I have to share to a wider audience, therefore this post.

I'm a french player, and part of "poker academie" website community.

A while back, some video there started to present and try to demonstrate the benefits of Poker Snowie.
Of course some people started to show some interest, while others were kindof skeptical.

After all this, Snowie team decided to team up with the community and start a challenge "human vs machine".
The terms of the challenge were simple enough :
- each challenger should play HU, 100+ bb deep, 3 000 hands or more vs Snowie AI
- people with a positive winrate at the end would receive a 1-year PokerSnowie licence

There were 7 challengers to take up the challenge. Most of them 6max / HU regs NL50/NL100 €, playing poker for years.
I was one who participated in this challenge. I didn't start playing right away but only after 1 or 2 day.

After the first night of the challenge, one already started complaining about the unbelievable number of coolers he ran into.

After playing it for some time, I had the exact same feeling, the few times I had a decent hand, he had air and folded to any aggression, but most times when he had something big, I also had a little something (FD on flop, DP or trips on river, etc...).

To me, it seemed unlucky at first, then really weird after more hands, and eventually plain rigged...

Given the fact that there is no way to export our hand history from that program, or to get any information on Snowie stats, etc...
I decided to grab the only stat I could get on my own with a decent sample : the preflop equity.

How do I do that, just check/call every street of every hand and take note of who's winning at showdown.

When I'm in SB, we both have a 100% range, and when I'm in BB I have a 100% range while Snowie has let's say a 90% range given that it's folding a few times.
Therefore I estimate its overall range to be 95% and should then have 50.8% equity against my own range.

After more than 700 hands, its equity is roughly 56% !

I know it's not an extremely huge sample, but given the fact that each hand count (unlike when you check how many AA you were dealt during 10kh dealt, for example), I think it's pretty reasonable to think it's starting to converge a little bit.

The likelyhood to get a result this far off from the theoretical equity over 700 coin flip is extremely low (you can check with any coin flip variance simulator online).
700 hands might seem low, but it's not that bad on this kind of stats.

Of course, when bringing up those results, some people defending Snowie came in the thread screaming some random bull**** about the fact that "of course" it can't be rigged, and started to making it personal to try to flood the reasonable questions we bring up into oblivion.
That was really pathetic of him, everybody noticed.

As if rigging it up wouldn't benefit Snowie's marketing team...

But obviously :
- If their bot is loosing versus pretty much anyone, nobody would pay to have its "GTO" advice regarding their plays.
Would you pay a coach who can't even win $ himself ? Here it's even worse, because if Snowie can't even win on a rake-free poker game, it's 100% worthless...
- On the other hand if they can show that it's winning versus a bunch of players, they will attract customers

Among the 7 people participating in the challenge:
- 1 says he doesn't think it's rigged
- 4 say they experienced a number of bad coolers way beyond anything they have ever seen on any poker room they played on, for years
- 2 didn't say anything

2 of them managed to have a positive winrate (and only 1 is also positive in EV bb/100).
Even the one who won with positive EV bb/100 is among those who claim to see a very biased distribution of setup and was able to be positive by exploiting Snowie on spots where he's weak and being extra careful when hitting anything decent... Very funny, really.


Some other facts about Snowie:

1. They state that it contains "no expert knowledge" inside and has computed their approximation of GTO with neuronal networks.
However, on the beginning of the challenge, Snowie limped a lot of hands from SB (really a lot), which means that it was thinking that it's GTO to limp those range of hands.
Couple of days later, it didn't limp anymore hands, ever (and without any notification of software update - an update came later a bit later though).
A while later the support team of Snowie said limping was a bug and that they fixed it. rotfl...
Yeah right, 2 days ago it was GTO, and now it's no way limping is bad. Sounds like "expert knowledge" included in the bot's strategy to me.
=> they're just lying about that

2. The way they "present" results on their website (for their worldwide challenge) is really poor:
The way Snowie classifies players is bad : the only way to be "good" is to play like him (cause it cannot judge by any other standards if your lines are good or not).
Therefore, if you play like him, or close to it, you will obviously have a very very low winrate.
But if you exploit it, then your playing level will go down (because you deviate from its equilibrium), and therefore your results will be drowned into all those bad players results who try snowie just for fun and shove half their hands just to see what happens.
=> those results are therefore meaningless and just a marketing scam.

3. If they wanted to prove their bot is good and nothing's rigged they could :
- move to open source for the "poker room" part of the software
- participate in world poker botting competition and end up crushing every other bots
- allow exporting hands to HEM/PT to let player at least check some basic stuff
- ...
But they're not doing any of those.


Overall it's more than enough to make up my mind on that software and shelve it on the scam category without any doubt.

And that's the best case scenario, worst case being that by using it you're helping them build a bot they will then put online instead of "sharing/selling" the AI... As it's been mentioned in some other threads here I've seen.


Looking forward to any comments,
nik0

Funny, I've done some researches yesterday and ended up in this poker academie thread (can't remember the link though, could you give it ?).

The "GTO approximation" part is obviously a joke and snowie deserves to be called a scam just for that. See the snowie thread on pokerAI for more details about that.

However the level of snowie is pretty much impossible to assess, for the reason you mentioned (they avoid fair competition), but I'm still surprised that you guys lost. IIRC there's another thread on the pokeracademie forum where other regs reported to have beaten snowie, and some 2+2 members reported the same thing using very basic strategy. How did you try to exploit it ? Did you go through the 2+2 thread beforehand to get some info/strats ? Did you try to 3bet 100% and rep any piece of the board postflop by overbetting ?

What you are saying about preflop equity is quite interesting too though. Are you sure about snowie's 90% vpip from sb ? I'll assume you are right. That's indeed 51.61% against your bb range using Sklansky's hand range selection, so an average of 50.8%. This is obviously and approximation as snowie doesn't necessarily follow Sklansky, especially HU. This should however be good enough.

I don't know the standard dev for poker preflop equity, but it's obviously smaller than for a coin flip given that the EV is 50% and the extreme values are 80%/20%.
Standard dev for 700 coin flips is root(700*0.5*(1-0.5)) = 13.23
5.2% of 700 is 36.4 so snowie is running 2.75 standard dev over EV.

If your results are right, then using the error function there's statistically less than 0.6% chance that snowie can run this good. If you could share your database that would be interesting.
Also, 0.6% might seem low enough to be a proof but I think a sample of 2k tries would be required for a more conclusive answer.

Link is here :
http://www.poker-academie.com/forum/...9-janvier.html

10 pages long, all french

I didnt beat it because, after discovering this was a real scam I was more interested in showing people what it really is than getting a 1-year licence on a crappy software...
And therefore did my check/call on a bunch of hands to prove it was biased.
(Obviously that's a losing strat ;p)

Also, stuff that was working the first couple of days got changed miraculously (on first day it was folding like 95% to small overbet on flop in small 3bet pots - the next day that was gone).
So it was just bull****.

I'm pretty sure about 90% vpip from snowie in SB.

And there is nothing I can do to share the hands I played as the software does not allow to export them. We both know why

Agree with you, those results are highly unlikely to happen if the tool is not rigged in some way. Thanks for the maths and the 0.6% value.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3X...it?usp=sharing

I've compiled Snowie's 6-max preflop ranges in case anyone is interested. Was planning to use Snowie to improve my postflop play but if you analyze hands while playing it becomes very clear that its postflop ranges are nowhere near GTO and that bets against it have way too much fold equity. In many cases, small bets have more fold equity than pot sized bets or shoves and in some spots it calls shoves with most of its range on the flop/turn but folds 90%+ of its range to a river shove after the action goes check/check. If it was GTO, seeing its ranges while playing shouldn't help an exploitative player but anyone analyzing its ranges while playing can easily find massive leaks and win the pot almost every time since its range usually contains mostly nuts or almost no nuts and it will only call overbets with the nuts. It's probably possible to win several bb per hand without looking at our hole cards simply by looking at Snowie's ranges and how it reacts to different bet sizes. You will go to showdown so rarely that your hand doesn't matter.

I did a little experiment with snowie just to test the system with a small sample. I didn't want to blow off too much money trying this so I allocated 5 buyins at $50 hunl to see what happened. I didn't use a HUD, I only used the "scenarios" function to mimic the exact situation while I was in live play. I copied a bunch of preset scenerios and practiced so I could do this quickly and not time out while I played. I even was able to adjust the effective stack sizes for each hand so I could play absolutely "perfectly." I also only played against regs who were already seated. Needless to say I lost my 5 buyins within around 1000 to 1200 hands. All of the players I played were pretty typical as they all were pretty loose preflop but tightened up tighter than a frogs *ss when it went to later streets. Snowie was calling big bets on later streets with bluffcatchers which I got crushed probably 90% of the time in those situations. Also, a lot of times snowie would float the flop, then when the bettor slowed down the action snowie did not recommend bluffing later steets with very little showdown value. Also, when snowie advised multiple actons a certain percentage of the time I also had a random number generator to assist in deciding on the 2 actions. I could look at my hands and break them down but I find it pretty useless and don't want to waste any more time than I have already on this. Just some info for you guys to consider. I know it's a small sample but it really felt weird taking his actions while I played. I felt like a much bigger fish than I really am. LOL.

But I felt good in the end because snowie said I play EXTRA TERRESTRIAL!!!

25/50 FRNL

UTG, UTG+1, and 2 more limpers limp to Hero SB and Snowie says hero should fold ATo 100% of the time, instead of completing for .5 BB. wtf

I wanna try this soft. but its change my mind D

100BB deep 6M nlh snowie wants us opening 42% when folded to our button. Interesting that snowie folds (just a few of the surprising hands I noticed) A2o-A3o, J8o, Q8o, 97o, 85s, 36s. Snowie folds those hands 100% of the time when it folds to its btn.