Friday, March 27, 2009

Proper hold'em strategy revealed in new study

I saw this post on Pokerati about a new study analyzing 103 million hold'em hands played in December, 2008, on PokerStars. Apparently Stars gave Citigal, a consulting firm, the logs including all of the hole cards to assist in this research. You can read a summary of the report here, or the whole thing here.

It turns out that only about 25% of the hands went to showdown. (It would have been interesting to see how that differed between limit and no-limit, but such information is not provided.) Of those that went to showdown, only about 50% of the time was the winner the player with what would have been the best hand had everybody stayed in. In other words, about half of the hands going to showdown would have been won by somebody else, had that player not folded at some point earlier in the action.

There is only one possible conclusion about how to win in online Texas hold'em: NEVER FOLD ANYTHING--NOT EVARRRR! My losses certainly seem to come from players following this strategy. Now I, too, know the secret.

4 comments:

Gunslinger said...

I think a better conclusion is this study might help show how there is more skill involved than luck in poker, if people are folding the winning hands that often.

Gunslinger said...

D'oh! Of course I comment before reading the actual article and its prominent conclusion.

James Shannon said...

Thank you Stars for convincing the fish that they shouldn't fold their 92o ... after all, any two cards can win! :P

Matt said...

Case closed.

Good post, thanks.