Yeah think it's generally a pretty ratty thing to do to advertise it if it is as good as you say.

bleurgh, moonshine -1

it is allowed to use pokersnowie realtime while playing?

thats ridiculous

I don't know why you are taking such an adversarial tone...I fully disclosed in the review that I am an affiliate for Snowie in the spirit of not being shady. I was going to write the review anyway and since I have been dabbling with learning html/how to build web pages and do web marketing on the side for the last 6 months or so, I figured that I may as well take the opportunity to learn how to create an ad banner for my website and make a couple free dollars while I did it.

The truth is that I am being paid exactly zero dollars by Snowie. They did not ask me to write a review for them, nor did they have any say in approving what I wrote. I sent only the part about the design of Snowie to them for feedback so that I could present factual information about how the brain of Snowie works to my readers.

I will probably be lucky if I get 3 subscribers for the 7 hours of work it took me to write that review and figure out how to edit my web page. I get like 6 hits a day on my blog and I have 65 twitter followers. I'm not exactly a super popular, one-man marketing machine over here. How much do you think I'd make playing poker for 7 hours instead? Hell, I didn't even post a link to it on 2+2. Do you really think I have some grand, ulterior profit motive here?

I stand by everything I wrote about Snowie. The brain at its core is an absolutely remarkable creation and the software that surrounds it is buggy but tolerable for the things it is capable of. I do, in fact, use it almost every day and have been doing so for the last couple of months. Is it a silver bullet that makes you magically good at poker? No, of course not. But it is a valuable tool I use along side other ones like Odds Oracle or CRev and it is almost certainly superior in its current and, especially, future potential abilities.


As for your other points:

1. Snowie cannot be used to evaluate real time decisions or even create your own scenarios that don't come from hand histories.

2. Snowie physically will not run when Stars is open. If you open Stars or FTP with Snowie running the program will automatically shut down without warning.

You are making some bold statements, claiming that people are playing with some sort of black-market decision making software. Do you have any proof to back up these claims?

I am not saying that it is impossible that someone out there is using the Snowie engine to play poker. Snowie is sort of the WMD of poker these days. If the brain behind it got into the hands of botters it would be utterly disastrous for the game. But in my experience talking with the developers, I don't believe they are running some botting operation on the side. It doesn't make any sense. Either they would never release the product and just run a bot ring (which would honestly probably make more financial sense) or they would sell the product and not jeopardize its integrity. Doing both is stupid.

I am obviously 100% against people using some black market Snowie to play poker for them and I would never promote a product that did such a thing. However, I see no reason to believe that this is actually happening and people who say these things are not just talking out of their ass.

That being said, I think we need to acknowledge that we are certainly reaching a critical tipping point in the game where technology is going to start rapidly blurring the line between what is and what isn't computer assisted play. Some tough decisions are going to have to be made in the near future.

A few of the earlier versions of Montenegrans were snap doing every action, betting, checking, and even making huge calls.

That was what first brought attention to them iirc.

edit: made the post before I saw yours

also wasn't refering to the banners but I searched for the word affiliate on your blog and it comes up 0 times so unless I'm supposed to put 2 and 2 together because of the banners, you never explicitly said that you were a Pokersnowie affiliate.

The only reason I realized you were an affiliate is when I finally got to the bottom and it says click on my referal link.

Well that is certainly sketchy if that was happening but it is a bit of a stretch to go from "Montenegrans are snap doing every decision" to "Montenegrans are an organized ring of Snowie-powered bots"

Like I said, I'm not sure what "moral" obligations I have since I'm not actually employed by Snowie but if somehow it is ever revealed that they are undercover botters I think it goes without saying that I would cease to associate with them....

I mean...come on. This is how they do it when you write about finance articles. You write the article and at the bottom, you disclose your position in the stock. I'm sorry it wasn't as blatant as you would like it but I think it's pretty apparent from what I wrote that I do have some interest in the company and I certainly had no obligation to even write anything at all.

But I will edit the post anyway so we can all be happy and move on with our lives.

This was before we even knew about snowie, the Montenegrans were suspected as bots for doing unorthodox stuff that we now know is because they "learned" from snowie on top of the fact that they were snap making decisions. That's about all the proof I have, but I'm sure countless other zoom regs will agree with me that when they first appeared it was at the very least sketchy and they were doing things instantly.

I just have 0 tolerance for botters/cheaters, sorry if I come off as hostile.

No, but it's no small thing that you're endorsing this software.

thanks

I hope you understand that a person with your reputation writing this blog does have an effect and it would be nice if you let people know that you do have a vested interest.

If me writing one post can have a great effect then I might just be the worst businessman ever for not getting compensated...lol

I experimented with poker snowie when it first came out because people were telling me that it was going to kill the games within a couple of years. My experiences of poker snowie is that it plays ****ing awful. It advises raise folding QQ from UTG and 4bet folding AK btn vs blinds.

When a 20/10 passive fish opens the btn, you call in the SB with 66 and a 12/6 nitfish shoves 100bb from the BB; it tells you folding is a huge mistake because in theory, you are exploitable if you're folding a hand as strong as 66 from the SB given the action.

It may play GTO or it may not, I have no way of knowing; but it almost certainly doesn't take the line which is the most +EV given how the player pool is actually playing.

If they have been working on this for the last few years and this is the best that they can come up with, I'm not worried.

thats what they say too.

they want gto, not max ev

Ive no knowledge of this software at all but raise folding QQ from UTG or 4-bet folding AK BTN vs blinds is obviously terrible and cant be part of a GTO strategy.

I tested the program and it's just an scam. It's playing breakeven poker at most.
They claim it to be close to GTO but if I'm not wrong nobody knows what GTO is so how they can guarantee us that Snowie is close to GTO ?
What bother me the most is that false advertizing.

(not to mention that if you want this program to work you have to upload hands into it, hands that you're giving them for free. ie, they're datamining)

I dont get how opinions on it can differ so much?

1. well. breakeven is all you need to run a bot profitably

2. i find that part concerning too. i wouldnt want to upload all my hands there. it probably enables snowie to get stronger and stronger


3. its still pretty impressive for a software to run breakeven in msnl

from the montenegro results, you should assume, its slightly better than BE though AND from the ipoker bots thread we know. bots can win close to 2ptbb over huge samples...
those msnl bots were huge winners and they had a similar, yet different playing style compared to snowie.
-> there is probably more than one crew trying to build neural network - bots OR it all originated from an early snowie version
-> remember the ipoker bots were limited in their betsizes too (halfpot, pot, overbet(allin))

According to the preflop advisor it generally advocates raise/calling QQ from UTG. So if you 4-bet QQ from UTG after getting 3-bet it may have said that it's a mistake (which it likely is against most reasonable players). But it's recommending a call not a fold. I'm not sure about all the other things you mentioned in your post, but Snowie is supposed to be a near-GTO approximation that doesn't care about opponent tendencies. So there will obviously be exploitative plays that you can make that will have a higher EV.

so just dont upload hands into pokersnowie, why help them make this software more powerful

What sites are support atm? Only stars and ftp?

This, particulary when those opinions are expressed by smart people that are respected for their knowledge in GTO

I ve been following discusions about snowie on many forums since over a month now, and i never considered to sub as much before having red your blog.

(sry for broken english, hope it makes sense )

According to preflop advisor snowie would 3bet with 66 from SB.

You are so wrong. Even if they are just breaking even or slightly losing due to the rake, you will lose money to it and they will suck the money from other players.

I am positive that snowie cannot beat 100NL, 50NL or lower limits because they didn't take the rake into account so they are seeing the flop too often (stats: 24/16). For example in preflop advisor you cannot select the stakes you are playing and it is not possible that the calling range would be the same on different limit. In lower limits it should not call so wide; with some hands they should 3bet instead. Also they should raise more from the button because regs are tighter than snowie from the blinds because of the rake. For example if you do some analysis with CardrunnersEV you can see that in HU matches when you play push/fold you can push wider when the pot is raked because your opponents should call tighter. (e.g. if the rake is 100% your opponents should fold AA and you should shove with ATC).

If someone starts to use snowie at the lower limits they are going to lose money but in the same time nobody will be able to win against them. All the money would be lost to a poker site.

You are right that you will win more if you don't use snowie but snowie can still help you in many ways. I did my own analysis and tried to figure out why it does some things.

Also it can help you adjust better against certain opponents. For example Montenegrins 3bet 6-8% and in snowie you can see what is optimal 4bet shove range so if you see that someone 3bets more or less you would know approximately how to adjust your 4bet range.
Also you can see that optimal resteal range from blinds is 12% so if you resteal less than 12% you know that you are exploiting yourself by folding too much.

There are some other interesting things. I played with preflop advisor facing 3bet after my raise and when I selected button and bb I saw that with JJ you almost always raise but with QQ and TT you raise only half the time.

It looks illogical but if your opponent 3bets KQ and AQ then if you hold QQ it is reverse blocker so it is higher chance that your opponent have AK, AA, KK instead of KQ and AQ. On the other hand if we hold JJ it is higher chance that they have KQ and AQ it is more difficult for them to continue.

In the same way TT is reverse blocker against JTs, T9s, QTs and KTs so if we have TT it is a higher chance that our opponent has a hand.

But I improved my play a lot by learning which made hands to turn into a bluff on the river and how to balance my range on certain flops. I will write about that some other time. Also I think that I found the way to take money from Montenegrins but in that case I must buy in for minimum and to play strange exploitative style. Snowie is limited in the number of different raise sizes so it would interpret wrongly some bet sizes because they only have half the pot, pot and shove/overbet so when you want to value bet the pot try to slightly overbet the pot before it interpret that as a different bet size.

It wouldn't help them because they are not trying to play exploitative and instead they try to play GTO.

Just to clarify the hands I posted. The online preflop advisor did tell you to fold QQ when facing a 3bet in the beginning when opening UTG. It told you to 4bet AA/KK and call 66-JJ, so it was probably just a bug in the system which they fixed.

The 66 hand was after I had already called. It doesn't tell what to do in real time, it only tells you the mistakes you've made afterwards. Not stacking off for 100bbs was a 'blunder'.

There were so many odd plays it suggested. I'd open UTG, cbet a gutter with a back door flush draw into two players (think it was QTs on K97r, get called by a player in the cutoff and then raised by a player calling from the small blind. Folding is not an option, its close between 3betting and calling. I don't know, I could be completely wrong on this but if it can play breakeven at least it's going to cause problems.

You're either completely braindead or just like to ruin things for others for your enjoyment, i.e. a total ****head.

hah

snowie sucks anyway, who cares

Good point. Surely, if it's unbeatable as they claim, they would make more money by just running it 24/7 at high stakes across all the sites rather than leasing it out to a few hundred grinders for $30 a month.

It's likely, that the former was their initial intention and when they realized it wasn't profitable, they didn't want to see 3 years of research go down the drain so decided to sell it to the public on the back of the publicity they had gained with the backgammon Snowie.