I was bored the other day and saw that ESPN has their own card room. Don’t bother: it’s not a wonderful experience. It’s all free, and they offer some prizes, but playing against a million people with their free million chips and trying to grab one of six or seven prizes is insane.
One of their prizes, though, is a copy of Poker Academy software, which I wasn’t familiar with. I’d heard people talk online about Turbo Hold Em, which has the same kind of model: simulate any number of hands, any number of ways, with any variety of software opponents.
In a word, it’s gorgeous. There are a few things that are slightly less perfect than the Poker Stars experience (which I consider to be the finest software user experience in online poker), but compared to Turbo Hold Em… wow. It’s a Java app, so it can get kind of pokey on older PCs, but the performance in a showdown simulation (dealing millions of boards to get exact percentages for specified hands) is ahead of native utilities built just for that.
Right out of the box, I thought of it more as a learning tool than a "game", but it offers surprisingly little in the way of constructive criticism. If you play long enough, you’ll eventually min-bet on the river (usually just to test the waters), and the software says not to do that, but I’m not sure how terrible a habit that is. I’ve been told many times that my raise is essentially committing me to the pot, which I suppose I’ll be more aware of in the future. Once or twice it’s told me that I’m folding a strong hand (like if I miss a flush draw, but didn’t see I’d made a straight), but much more often, I’ll be told that I have a strong hand ("are you sure you want to fold?") when I’ve made the decision that my aces or kings are no longer good (like a board with a pair and 3 to a flush, let’s say… just too many ways to lose). So it’s a lot of false positives, but I appreciate the reminders.
As a game, it’s awesome. If you have ever wanted to simulate a tournament with deep stacks, you can do just that. If you want to play a single table SnG in about ten minutes, you can: the computer opponent takes almost no time to make up its mind about what action to take. And once you’re out of the hand, you can zip through at light speed to your next decision. (Your table reading skills will not really improve with this tool.) A 1000-player MTT can be simmed in no time at all. And all the defaults for Party, Poker Stars, etc. (like starting chips, blinds, even timers) are all included, so the simulation is pretty solid.
The stats aren’t as comprehensive as what Poker Tracker provides, but the presentation is much nicer. Pretty charts and graphs show your tendencies, but there’s nothing screaming out where your holes are. And if you’re charting your tournaments now (moving the line up 10 when you win $10, down $1 when you lose $1), you’ll be impressed by the way Poker Academy draws a line of your chip count between the start of the tournament and the end. If they had something like this for real money play, I’d be all over it.
Other ways you could train: start a cash game, and leave the button immediately to your left if you think your late-position play is weak. Replay every hand until you understand exactly why everyone in every chair made every decision they made. Or start a limit tournament, and check the pot odds (with your opponents’ actual holdings and relative strengths) in every tough decision.
There is, of course, the question of "how good are the bot opponents, really?" I’d say they aren’t great (in particular, they seem unafraid of overcards when playing pocket pairs), but I’m still having a hard time beating them, so I definitely need to continue learning and refining my game. One also wonders if they are bad in the same way that low-limit NL and tournament players are, and if hardening my defenses against computer play will still leave a squishy spot for two-bit gimps to poke at.
Poker Academy is $29, and there’s this idea among poker players that any money spent on any education tool might be worth it, since it might save you one bad bet a month over the course of the rest of your life. I’ve scaled back my poker playing recently, and not only does this tool scratch the itch to play (and do a reasonable job of simluating people playing for money), but I think I’m learning a lot about full-table dynamics.
