Thanks for the reply although I'm still don't understand.

This tree starts on the river and all of the cards have been dealt, i.e. the board is fixed. I wanted to set the analysis to have the out of position player check a certain range and then raise with the best 33% and the worst 5%. The board is AK872 with no flush possible. The best hands were selected just fine for the check raise option. When selecting the worst hands, I would think it would go with the hands with the worst overall hand strength such as Q5, Q6, etc and other unpaired hands. Instead it puts in some top pair hands.

One reason I can think that this could be the case is that StoxEV isn't looking at the order of the hands in terms of absolute hand strength but rather at their EV. It so happens that this is the river so the hands are either winning or not winning after the opponent bets. In this case since AT is losing to villains betting range the same as Q5 perhaps StoxEV views them as the same and is just picking whichever it comes across first to put into the worst part of the range.

While the above is a fine feature for sure, I'd really love to be able to sort by my own range according to absolute hand strength as well. I guess I can see how this would/could be less fruitful when there are more cards to come though.

The reason is indeed that villain's range is top pair top kicker or better. For that reason raising both with Ax or with a highcard has the same EV on the river, both are blufs versus villain's range.
This is not a problem on earlier streets, since the equities of almost all hands will differ a bit.
However in this case there is a very wide range of hands that all have equity 0%. StoxEV orders them somewhat at random when determining the bottom X%.

im not so smart sometimes, so this could be a silly question, but atm i'm confused so i'm going to ask - what exactly does the ev displayed under a decision mean?

the context where it came up is a bb v. btn flop where bb checks, btn bets a range that includes 'value hands' + var1% of all others, and bb raises 'value hands' + var2% of all other hands. i then generated a table of ev(c/r) for a range of these two variables.

so, now i have these numbers but i dont know if they are directly comparable to each other. that is, to find the optimal strategy, do i need to manually consider the frequency that each play is made?

continuing with the example, if the c/r range of [value hands + 0% of other hands] returns an ev of +1.4bb, and the c/r range of [valuehands + 50% of other hands] returns an ev of +0.8bb, do i then need to consider the fact that i could realize that 0.8bb of ev far more often? or does the software already take that into account in some way?

this should probably be intuitive, and maybe i'm just being ******ed, but could somebody please help me understand how to compare ev's to find the best strategy?

thanks.

Hi,

I just arrived at my destination after two days of travel so I'm about to go to bed
Just letting you know I've read your question and will answer it in about 24 hours.

Too jetlagged atm

Cheers,

Scylla

was this aimed at my question?

Yes it was.
I just got home and have a lot of catching up to do.
I'll answer in a bit.

Ok, here I am.
My apologies for not answering earlier.
I was abroad with my laptop and ... it crashed.
Blue screen of death and everything.
I hope a format will fix it.


Your EV is the amount of money you expect to make on average with that decision.
For instance if you expect to win $100 70% of the time and lose $50 30% of the time your EV will be 70%*$100-30%*$50=$55.

To solve this, you need to find the combination of var1 and var2 in the graph where neither player's EV improves at that point in the graph if he either increases or decreases his var1/var2.
There should be exactly one point in the graph where this occurs.

However, you make a good point about including the frequency that something happens. This is not done in EV mode. If you also want to weigh for the times that something actually happens you should toggle to "Absolute" mode (it's the blue/red button directly to the top right of the StoxEV logo). However, I just noticed that using this setting is not applied to when you use a graph. Graphs always seem to use EV, also if the setting is absolute. I'll change that in the next update. I expect I'll put up a fix around tuesday. Thanks for pointing this out!

could you please explain the way the weighting is done? or maybe point me to the relevant part of the manual (i cant seem to find anything).

It's both described in the video manual and the written one. In the written one the first mention of it is under "Adding a preflop condition of our own". However, it's not described as a separate section.

To assign a weight to a condition simply click on the button that says "100%". Here you can enter your weight. Now, when StoxEV calculates the tree and comes across this condition it will
1) check if the condition applies
2) if so, accept it with a frequency according to the weight.

If a condition is rejected based on its weight, StoxEV will skip all conditions below it in the current action and skip to the next action.

Let me know if that's not clear enough.

thanks for the response, but i was asking about the difference between relative and absolute mode.

you mention that absolute mode 'weighs for the times something actually happens'. i've played with toggling between modes but don't really understand what's happening...

if it's in the written/video manual, please point me to the 'chapter'/time stamp.

thanks again.

Let's say when you flop four of a kind, your EV will be displayed as $100.
However, you'll only flop four of a kind 0.24% of the time.

In this case:
- Relative mode considers only your EV at the time of your decision. Your EV is $100.
- Absolute mode weighs your EV by the percentage of the time this line actually occurs. The absolute amount of money you'll make this way is 0.24%*$100=$0.24.

I just reformatted and installed Windows 7. Will my old license for StoxEV work or do I need to email you for a new one?

I'm not really sure. Your hardware shouldn't change, so your hardware ID shouldn't either. Just give it a try and let me know if you need a new key.

Hi,

its my first post. don't be too rough on me.
So, I've got the commercial edition for 3 days now and spent tons of time on it (my gf hates me now).
Nevertheless I got some questions:



other questions will be posted soon

Thanks

padawan

Hi,

Variance is a mathematical quality that measures how much a certain number is expected to vary.
In poker, when you have a low variance play this means that you take a line where you don't risk losing a lot of money.
When you take a high variance play you take a line where generally you may either lose a lot or win a lot.

Variance in StoxEV is a measure for the spread in your EV when you win money in your line (and how much) compared to how much and how often you lose.


Example:
You have 76s in the cutoff and raise to $3.
The button 3bets to $9.
You try to decide whether to 4bet to $25 or fold.
When you 4bet you expect the button to fold in 65% of the cases and push all in in 35% of the cases.


In this example 4betting is a high variance play and folding is a low variance play. When you fold you know exactly what you'll get, you'll have an EV of $0 in 100% of the cases.

The EV and Variance of folding:
EV=$0. Variance=$0.

The EV and Variance of 4betting (ignoring rake):
EV=65%*(3+9+1.5)-35%*22=$1.075
Variance:
When you win you gain $13.5.
When you lose you lose $22.
Some math shows that your variance here is $16.5.

As you can see, variance is a measure here for the spread around the $1.075 average outcome.



Footnote 1:
The formula for variance is



Footnote 2:
Variance in StoxEV is actually standard deviation, which is the square root of variance. Its formula is
.
I'm just calling it variance because in my experience, when people talk about variance they actually mean standard deviation. Second reason is that in monte carlo mode I already use standard deviation as a measure of error. I thought it would be better to use variance as a term to describe the spread to avoid confusion.
The formula for Standard deviation is

Please call standard deviation "standard deviation" and variance "variance", that would be better.

Alternatively, you could add an option to StoxEV called "I haz maths" which is off by default. If the user selects this option then you use the correct terms, otherwise you do the Iceland / Greenland thing.

Here's the problem.
In the above example the variance would be 272$^2, which is not practically meaningful until you take its square root to obtain the $16.5 number for standard deviation.
Yes, I could call it standard deviation, but then in monte carlo mode it would say EV:... std:... std:...
Here the first std would be the error in measuring the EV in the simulation and the second one would be the spread in EV.
Lots of ground for confusion.
I decided to just call it Variance.
Technically incorrect, but I felt it was the best way of conveying what the number meant.
If I had either used the term std or used the squared way of displaying the number, in both cases I would have to constantly explain what each number meant.

hi, please look at my attaced stx file:

http://rapidshare.com/files/30621060...izing.stx.html





do you see my mistake?

Thanks

padawan

btw, thanks for the explanation on variance!

http://rapidshare.com/files/30641313..._turn.stx.html

Hi, here is another scenario I dont get correctly, please have a look



Changing the percentage to 100% HC works fine...

Thanks

In your current setup SB calls with 2p and KK if your bet is at most 300.
When he calls he has 84.3% equity against your range.
This happens in 38.5% of the cases.
When you bet more than 300 and get him to fold you pick up the 378 pot, which is a huge win.

You have set 80%-hc for Bet 60, which is fine.
Now, I asume your intent is that the other hc's are dealt with by the Check action.
You simply need to set this to 100%.
The way is it set now the hc's that reach that branch of the tree are only accepted 20% of the time. StoxEV doesn't know what to do with the remaining hc's.

Cheers,

Scylla

lol. havent thought about equity. i am just seeing numbers numbers numbers.
thanks scylla

Hi Scylla, I think your program is great so far, but the first time using it it crashed on me whilst editing my conditions. I'll ship you an email regarding the matter, but I was wondering if you could add an autosave function. It would've been nice to have on as it took me a while to figure out stuff and then all my work was lost. Cheers.