Quote:
Originally Posted by alex_pa
Thank You for playing PokerAlfie,
Sorry, for not answering your E-Mail, it was by accident.
When I made PokerAlfie in 2017 the only reference for quality of playing was
1. Mr. C. L. (He did not want his name to be published)
- He was the 31st in a Live-Tournament and collected €624
- He won against PokerAlfie with 0.0047 Big-Blinds per hand (we can say almost Tie) after playing 5000 hands
2. Srdjan Pavlovic Nislija
- Nislija's worldwide highest ranking at PocketFives is 394.
- Nislija played against PokerAlfie over 5000 hands and PokerAlfie was better for about 0.05 Big-Blinds per hand
In 2017 my poker skill was very bad, there was no chance for me to win against PokerAlfie.
Of course, writing an algorithm to play Poker and Poker-Skill are two very different things.
I thought, these two guys are competitive players and PokerAlfie plays decent.
So, I challenged the good players if they can win against PokerAlfie
In the mean time I know, that a serious player can beat PokerAlfie.
I still find PokerAlfie a very useful tool for improving poker skills or just for playing Poker.
Many users are very glad for using PokerAlfie.
Of course, people that reached such a descent level as you, see no use of PokerAlfie.
Best Regards,
Alex – Developer of PokerAlfie
Hi Alex,
I was away for a bit, thanks for responding.
A few things about your "pros"
The credentials you gave are not credentials. If you and I put both put our grandmothers into some poker tournaments they could leverage some tournament finishes. 31st place in a tournament is a wholly meaningless result. There's a massive amount of variance involved in poker, especially tournaments due to the structure where people make sub-optimal decisions can have good performances over a short sample size. There have been finalists and even winners of the World Series of Poker, surviving a tournament of thousands of people, including many of the best in the world who are long term losing players.
Likewise, pocket 5s rankings only indicates gross results not wins and losses. Essentially, the people who lose the most money in the game and are who the ecosystem is built around will always rank very highly on that site. It's also where you need to opt into the program in order to get ranked. So it's neither a complete list nor an accurate one. For example, I never opted in there because there's really no benefit at all unless you want to deceive people who don't understand how their rankings actually work.
Now he's blocked trackers from seeing his history, so we don't have much to work with.
But it's pretty clear he's a recreational player and possibly has lost money overall.
His play history is all over the place, he's playing $109 tournaments and $1 ones at the same time. This screams casual losing poker player and is a big red flag.
Again, these are only the results where he cashed. We have no idea what he played in where he lost.
He opted out of the more objective trackers, which is also what a lot of people did too. I too opted out simply because I didn't want opponents to analyze my stats.
But the info we do have there seems to confirm casual player.
See this he's a losing player who got managed to win one big tournament for 42k. Take that one result away and everything is a loss. If we had a time machine and had him not win that for 42k but rather still crush it and finish in 4th place fo 8k then we have a losing player. Take away that entirely and we have a bad losing player.
I have no doubt he understands poker pretty well. It's also possible he's somewhat talented at it. But if I were to guess, I'd say he's not a very good player at all and would welcome him at my table. But even is he was a winning player, it sure doesn't look like he was thriving and would have made more money working at Walmart during this time. That number on pocket fives doesn't include losses, so even if profitable, his net is going to be a significantly smaller number - which broken down over several years is not much income at all. I understand that not much income would be required in Serbia and if he was able to play for a living then good for him. I don't mean to attack him too much, he could be a very nice guy. But he's not representative of an elite player by any objective measurement whatsoever.
And lastly, he played tournaments. Which is an entirely different kind of poker than cash games, which is what alfie is and tournament players are notoriously worse at cash games as they play a format that's more based on the structure of the tournament (IE a lot of your decisions are influence not by optimal play etc but by how many players and chips are remaining) whereas cash games are just pure unfiltered poker.
Again, I'm not trying to be mean. Your anonymous friend and Srdjan are the losing players the economy needs in order to keep people like me fed and clothed. But your marketing doesn't claim that Alfie beat some guys who've played a lot of tournament poker. Instead you claim it beats world class pros, which is simply not true. I don't think you intentionally tried to deceive people, I also don't think that these other two people tried to deceive you. They probably genuinely believe themselves to be good at poker.
I am personally small potatoes in poker. If I doxxed myself and you googled me you'd find far less info than what is available on Srdjan. I haven't played professionally for well over a decade and I mostly played live, which is a significantly easier game. People don't see me here and think "Oh rick he's so good at poker" they instead know me for things like microwaving steak.
If you wanted to work with genuine pros to help test the engine and improve it, I'm sure you could start a thread here and find some very good players. In the meantime, I highly suggest you change the language with which you market this software into something more truthful. Just say that it beat some highly knowledgeable poker players. At the very least you should remove the "unbeatable over a 5k sample" because I've clearly demonstrated this is no longer the case.
I will wipe the data and check out the update though
GLGL and feel free to reach out at any time. I'm in software myself, which is a major reason why I took so much interest in this in the first place because it's where two of my passions intersect.