After working with snowie for a while I am pretty sue the critics are just mumblers that don't get it.

I for once have changed my game extremely fast using it and learned quite bit. It looks also like my win rate has profited. I.e I was able to learn HU play thx to snowie.

If u think it's not GTO why don't u prove or show why not.

From a practical perspective this is the first time someone can show me in an easy to understand way what GTO actually means.

first they came for knircky, and i didn't speak out because i wasn't knircky..

I've never used it or seen anything about it except the annoying questions people ask about it. Even if it's profitable, profitable is not the same as GTO. If you were a losing HU player I could probably have given you 20 simple rules that could have increased your EV. Do I therefore know a nearly GTO solution?

Oh, of course, the burden of proof DOES usually lie with the general public and not the person making a specific claim. That's why most research papers are people just saying "HI I CURED CANCER IF YOU DON'T THINK SO WHY DON'T YOU PROVE IT"

This is what's so annoying - the stupid **** snowie adherents say. If it's not GTO, then it's not showing you what GTO means. Your happiness with it is completely based on the assumption that it's GTO.

If you never used it how can you be so negative about it?!
I use it 6 weeks now and in that period of time it turned me from a breakeven 10NL player to a winning 25NL player so far.
For me it is not really the question does is it really excactly plays GTO but can it make you better. And the answer is yes.
On a dutch forum there is a discussing going on with guys who are playing 500NL zoom and higher and they say that snowie doesn't make many mistakes.
Only bet sizing is still a problem.

Sweet, so I suppose you'll be very supporting and glowing when I publish my paper next month about making a stable fusion reactor.

Claiming a GTO solution to poker is a really big deal. It's an enormous claim. Even claiming "near GTO" is a pretty fabulous claim. If someone comes up to you and tells you he just saw an alien come out of a flying saucer, you ask for evidence, you don't just believe him. If someone says "come, on, you've never even been to Roswell, NM, how can you be so negative about this guy's claim"

I've said more than once in this thread - snowie could be really great at poker, I don't care. What I care about is the claim that it's GTO or near GTO. Extraordinary claims require evidence.

Ok point taken, i'm not claiming it's playing perfect GTO or even near GTO but it seems a really helpfull tool to me. I'm just wondering why so many people seems to be real negative about it.

Because everyone else IS claiming those things. Including, like, the people who make the software. From their site:

the world class Game Theory Optimal artificial intelligence engine.
PokerSnowie - play perfect game theory optimal poker

and so forth. Now, if you don't think that those things are true, how do you feel about the makers of the software claiming that?

It's a particularly egregious claim for non-HU play (I don't think they've solved HU play either but the idea that they've solved, say, 6 max, is ludicrous). It's such a bold unsubstantiated claim that I think the word "scam" is entirely appropriate.

I agree about the GTO stuff, but to call it a "scam" whitout ever trying the program that's stupid imo...

RustyBrooks raises an excellent point. I cannot but agree that PokerSnowie is nothing short of being a total scam. It's like MacDonalds marketing poo as meat in their hamburgers. It's not GTO so don't market it as such.

If they say it's something, and it's not that thing, then that's a scam. Why would I need to "try it out?" What would that even prove?

True, play perfect GTO poker is exorbitant but the program itself is not a scam that's my point.

You and I clearly have different definitions for "scam"

not that i like this program being around in any ways, and seeing that you are in a bad mood rusty, but still ..at what distance from GTO does scam start?

Is say almost anywhere that the claim is made without evidence.

What they are saying about their product isn't true. Is it ok to lie if your product is "good" by some other method?

Every cheesecake I sell has a diamond embedded in it. Why are you mad, its great cheesecake?

RustyBrooks echoes some thoughts I've heard from very smart people about this.

On the other side, I see a lot of paranoid guys thinking this software will kill the games.

My only thoughts are that whoever markets it has done a hell of a good job with it. It's obviously not some random play bot, but it probably could be and still be selling well given how the marketing has been. Between the perfect play lines and the backgammon angle, it really seems to strike a chord with so many users.

I'd like to see it trialed against other bots in public competitions, rather than simply playing players on their own closed circuit system. But I don't know why they would do that unless they were 95% sure it would win, otherwise there's no upside to it given the public reaction to this software (combination of omg awesome and fear driven "don't talk about it" hype that just makes it more talked about).

i don't want to roll the drum for them (nasty product, kills baby fish) ..but as far as i understand the matter the question to be answered would be if if they have found a method that approaches GTO and will land there about, given enough time or horse power.

damn-floating-point-numbers-never-add-up-to-one-ly

This is a great point. Jungle was dead on about that Portuguese player too.

People may find the Thinking Poker podcast interesting on Snowie.

Check this out: http://www.thinkingpoker.net/category/podcast/

The problem here as far as I can tell is that they're not actually interested in clearing this up.

People who don't work with computers in general, or AI in particular, are prone to misunderstanding these issues pretty badly. At every stage in the evolution of AI, such as it is, people are constantly solving the easy half of a problem, then declaring that solving the rest is a trivial matter of applying some "horsepower" to it, and then never actually solving the problem. AI stuff are full of these non-linear problems where you come to a promising point early on and then fizzle out.

But let's be clear here, if they had a GTO solution for multiplayer poker, or even a real idea of how it could be feasibly produced, we'd be talking like nobel prize material. I don't think people appreciate how far-fetched the idea that they have near-GTO solutions for multiplayer full stack games is.

Like, the well known progress in poker GTO, imagine that's, like, a walnut. A GTO solution for full stack multiplayer NLHE would be like, our galaxy.

Hey, near GTO or not, if it can beat top pros....BOSS

I was skeptical, still am, but if it can beat some1 like Jungle HU over a large sample, the damn thing is a boss in my book.

Well according to their own marketing material it didn't beat jungleman.

BTW Rusty is handily winning the thread, I don't know why you guys keep debating his points.

Edit: But I guess I'm glad there is debate because I'm finding Rusty's responses very interesting. Just don't beat dead horses.

listening to the podcast ..levermann kind of answers my question what this thingy could be good for, apart from beating up meat sacks ..measuring skill (about 1:07:30).

no idea how good it has to be to make a good measure (i'd guess both aspects are related but you don't have to be perfect to serve as a good measure) and ..bare w me i hardly have the words to express myself in this context ..i would think that measuring skill is not a linear thing in poker for local maxima/minima may/do exist.

any thoughts on this? will we get (elo) ranked now or will we have to ****storm sites out of crazy ideas evolving around this?

It's an interesting concept...the idea of finding an objective way to rank poker players. If they can do it with Chess and Backgammon then it can't be hard to find a way to rank order poker players. Now...whether this is a good thing or not is another matter.

I wanted to get an idea of Snowie and used the trial to import some FullRing hands.

Don't know much about GTO, but does it really dictate to 4bet/fold AK vs. a 50BB Stack 100% of the time, getting 2,5:1 on the call?

I thought chess players were ranked based on their performance against one another.

In HUSNGs, we've had ideas come and go for head to head type leagues with rating systems.

At the end of the day, the successful players just want to play for money, since their hourlies are nice.

Plus, if you used performance vs a bot to measure skill, I'm not sure you would get an accurate rankings system if you're looking to measure real skill against the field. That's because you would be measuring skill against the bot. So you'd have a great system on "who can best beat this bot" but you wouldn't likely have anything except an indicator between bad and good to measure how good players are against the real players they play at the tables everyday.