Quote:
Originally Posted by solarglow
As an aside, it seems the authors imply it is not statistically possible to infer the true distribution of starting hand ranges only by observing them because of bias (position and hand strength) and small sample size. So does this mean we assume standard starting ranges and only take meaning from observations that strongly deviate from these norms?
This is not exactly an area of my specialty, and I've had a lot of questions about it myself over the years. But that does seem right to be. A *huge* problem is that you only see hands that go to showdown, which obviously show have a huge bias in them. Pairs and big cards should go to showdown more because they make showdown worthy hands more.
Something I always wondered is, do "most" people order starting hands in the same order? I think the answer is "no." If they did it would be easy because it doesn't take long to see what *percent* of hands a player plays. If they play 15% and you had an ordered chart that should correspond to a certain range. There are still issues of circumstances (position, have there been limpers/betters/raisers/etc) but it's way easier than reality.
I observed that with some types of players, they might place a higher value of suited cards, and other players might place a higher value on high cards, or connected cards, etc.
It seems like there's a lot of guesswork involved. I think over time you can start to classify players by "types" and that players with the same type might have similar ranges given a percentage of the time they pay to see a flop.
I think sometimes a flawed metric based on a large sample might be more useful than a perfect metric based on a small one. When I played a lot of stud games I would have my HUD show PFR based on door card, which is useful but takes 13x as long as getting a generic PFR. So I tended to show both numbers. Global PFR is less useful but converges faster so I didn't have to wait 1000 hands to know how to play a guy.