Hello poker players,

If this is the wrong forum for this topic, mods feel free to move it (like you need me to tell you that ).

I am a programmer, and I was thinking about writing a program called Grindstone, whose purpose would be to "sharpen your poker axe". I would distribute it for free a la PokerStove (an excellent program in its own right).

My thought was to have it give you random exercises to help you sharpen your calculating abilities, i.e.

- show a random flop (or turn or river) and ask "what is the best possible hand on this board"
- show two random cards and ask "is this a top 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% or none-of-the-above hand"
- general odds (for memorization) i.e. what is the probability someone else has an ace if you have one, what are the odds of flopping a fourflush with 2 suited cards, flopping a set, etc.
- give the player two random cards, a flop, a pot size, and a villain bet, and have the player calculate whether or not he has immediate pot odds. I would love to figure out how to make algorithmizable exercises for calculating implied odds - any suggestions?
- I've even thought about coming up with situations and presenting random villain stats and/or random reads and asking, what is the best play in this situation? But that would probably be really hard to do.

Thoughts on this? Would it be a useful practice tool? Any other thoughts on what kinds of questions/exercises that a computer could meaningfully/algorithmizably present that would have a reasonably concrete answer?

Thanks
DalTXColtsFan

And how might I come up with exercises to test the player's ability to "pay attention", i.e. which villains are calling 3-bets pre with QJo or worse, which villains are shoving TPTK etc. - what are useful things to watch for that could be presented by a computer?

I like your idea.

But don't set out on something too big. Do one thing at a time.

Also, what you are describing looks like a quiz generator, if you don't want to go through the hassle of having to write your own UI from the ground up, you could re-use existing quiz ``players'' like Anki (http://ankisrs.net/), and make your programs generate quizzes to be read by them. That's how I'd do it.

(and don't make big plans on sharing something and becoming famous before you wrote it. been there done that.)