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Comment by matt1 | Hacker News Reader

I assume you're talking about PokerStove, no? I happily used it for a long time, but felt it could use some improvement. For example, you can't weigh the hands in your opponent's range (that is, saying KK is half as likely as AA). Also, PokerStove is great for calculating equity, but not so much for calculating EV. To calculate your EV when you call is pretty easy (EV = equity * new_pot - to_call), but to calculate your shove EV takes a bit of work. My aim with ALL IN expert was to make those things trivially easy to do. Eventually I had planned on doing postflop calculations as well (the first iteration only had preflop), but as I mentioned elsewhere I just didn't see it being worth the investment in time for a project that didn't have much of a future.

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Interesting article. I remember reading your announcement on 2p2 at the time. I went to your website and scanned the 2p2 thread.

The main reason I didn't buy it was that from what I read it seemed like anything I could do with your program I could already do with PokerStove or StoxEV. And they're both free.

If you want me to pay for poker software (and I've paid for lots of poker-related software) you have to convince me that it will give me an edge or allow me to do something that I can't already do with existing free software.

I guess the lesson there is that you have to clearly show how spending the money will benefit the customer. I agree, the homepage didn't do it very well. Thanks for the post. What did you think of StoxEV?

I found StoxEv to be quite powerful but also quite complex. It took me a while to figure out how to use it. But once I grokked it, it's a powerful program that can facilitate very detailed analysis of a hand.

Having said that, I don't actually use it that much - for most situations I find PokerStove is good enough.

Yup, pokerstove. I agree that weighted range calculations aren't so easy with pokerstove, but it's pretty easy to make a good estimate. Still, it's definitely useful, and a feature I expected to be in pokerstove the first time I used it.

Still, I don't get why you would focus on preflop calculations. Knowing whether to shove preflop is pretty easy, isn't it? The tough decisions are often when you face an overbet on the turn or river, in my experience.

The calculations are actually still done the same.

Preflop is easier to build an interface around, which is why I chose to focus on it for the first iteration. PokerStove's postflop range selection tool worked, but I felt it could have been done a lot better. For example, how would you select the range "A2s-ATs of hearts and clubs" using PokerStove? Making a clean way to select that would have been the next step for ALL IN Expert.

Was it just for cash games, or did you offer ICM calcs too?

$cEV = $EV; no ICM calcs.

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