I have to say that this is an amazing piece of software, I think others have mentioned that it provides a great baseline for decision making and you deviate from there based on opponents.
I purchased this after Black Friday, I am a casual player and I actually enjoy the game and wanted to work on math/decision making while waiting for poker to come back to the USA online. I played a bunch of hands vs the AI, and it has surprised me a few times, usually in a good way, but it is very consistent and very good, if I am going to a live game, I will setup a table, and put in AI opponents that I am likely to face there, fishy homegame, 1/2 charity, etc.. and I practice, its amazing how I learned what the simulator would do, and it would be the correct play almost all the time in those settings.
I then got antsy and opened an account on Cake, my winrate skyrocketed initially, its not good anymore, but what did impress me about my stats, is on the grader in PTR, I have A+ grades on every street but showdown which is a C- (I showdown more than 35% of players at the stake) Going to Poker Edge, it classifies me as a shark (Solid Tag) throughout the bulk of it, then on the last downswing I got gun shy a bit and morphed into a Rock.
I wish I could report a positive winrate, but its only 18K hands on Cake and I only deposited $50 to start so I dont have a good bankroll to be playing aggressively like I should be.
For me, seeing the improvement of my decision making, was a huge verification, that what I was learning from the Sim, was translating into good performance at the tables.
The Devs are very accomodating and listen to customer suggestions and are surprisingly fast to turn those suggestions into code and get an update out.
------
Quote:
Originally Posted by ComplexP
Hmm this thread is pretty much dead it seems. I had basically forgotten about this but now I am ready to try it, I'd like some input from players - did it actually improve your WR significantly you think, which part you like best, are there negative effects on your game too etc.
Right now I'm just interested in the scenario simulation, hopefully I'll get a good enough idea if I'm to buy it or not in 2 weeks
The toughest decisions in poker are faced on the river, the Sim's Preflop game is absolutely perfect, its flop game is amazing, I dont know if its just that because of the pre-flop and flop game being so good, that I dont get as much experience on the Turn/River with the sim or what, but my winrate ended up in the red over a small sample, it started out very high and just plumented, the Sim is not to blame for this, its my own play, so its hard to seperate what the Sim would have done, vs what I did, but I think the sim kept my winrate less red, if that makes sense, in fact I had a losing session that I remember clearly I was starting to tilt, and so I just went into the mode of "what would the sim do" and it ended up being a great session even though I lost money, it would have been much worse.
What I like about the sim, is that you dont need to multi-table it, because of the skip feature, if you want to practice multi-tabling different opponents, it can do that, I didnt notice performance issues, but I dont multi-table many when I play online either. Basically you can get a ton of hands in, in a very short time, which will allow you to learn faster than you realize.
The "play with cards Faceup" is awesome, its scary how the AI wont pay you off when you superuse on it, and its also good to see that the advice it is giving you, actually checks out with what hands villain shows up with, in terms of should we be folding. I always play with the advice off, and the cards hidden, then when I am in a spot where I think I should fold, but I am not sure, I treat it as a fold, then I look at villains cards, then I look at the advice. Basically after each hand, it tells you how you did, so I am playing and hoping to see that my result of the hand was "good job" and then if it deviates as "mistake" "Not Ideal" sometimes I dig into the advice, see where I went wrong. Usually it favors a check/bet over what you did as being more likely to make more money.
The Hand Range situation feature is new, its awesome so far, I cant wait to see what they add to it, I would like to see more, the hand situation that seems to come up often online, is I have AKs in late position, facing a very tight UTG open, the Sim wants you to get stacks in depending on how deep you are, I do this online and they always show up with AA or KK its just 90% of the time, so I put it in the range analysis, and I put the UTG on QQ+ AKo+ and I have position, the sim still wants me to be getting money in, and I would like to tailor it further to maybe adjust HUD stats on UTG such that he is only 4 betting with QQ+ AKo+ or even opening UTG with that tight a range, I dont think its going to want me to get all-in vs this opponent, it is amazing at how well AKs does if you start adding a couple more hands to his range, and its cool to be able to have the luxury of running this situation over and over and seeing how it will play out. You could also try to play against a strong range in position with suited connectors, etc.. and see how to extract value post flop, its just got a ton of posibilities, but its still new and there is room for improvement.
There is nothing else like this on the market, I've looked, this Simulator nails it as a tutor, for a good TAG baseline to work with, add more hands pre-flop, play spewier post-flop, however you deviate, the sim will give you a solid foundation to grow off. And it will help you post-flop even if you took a hand to the flop that it would not recommend.
...
