Help me decide which is the best program

Lukedanieljames · Post by **Lukedanieljames** » 2005-12-16 08:33am

Hi there guys, I'm sure all of you watch Texas Holdem on Tv (poker) just so you can relate to what i'm doing.

On my computer i have a software program that plays texas holdem. However this program is fully customizable, it plays exactly how you want it, down to the actions of each hand (169 possible starting hands)

you can set its aggressiveness on specific topics (chasing a flush/straight/3 of a kind) etc etc

So I have 9 'personalities' setup and I have them playing tournament after tournament and i put each of their finishes into an excel wordsheet. The sheet tracks which place they finished 1-9. I then have excel take all the finishes of each personality and take the average.

here is the problem

One of my programs, or rather personalities, call it personality A, has an average finish of 3.22. (best out of the 9) another is at 4.01, lets call it personality B. Other personalities finish with slightly higher averages. (the worst is 6.7)

However, pesonality A has NEVER managed to finish 1st, floats around 2-4 a lot of the time, once or twice finishing 7th. However, personality B has finished 1st three times. But the other times it finishes worse than personality A or its average would be lower.

So my question is, which is the better program? The one that can always finish second place (figurately) or the one that can be a champion but sometimes fails miserably.

??

Lukedanieljames · Post by **Lukedanieljames** » 2005-12-16 08:36am

rather, let me just correct, personality B has finished 1st 4 times (misread the sheet)

So far they have had 13 tournaments

Post by **Ghost Rider** » 2005-12-16 08:50am

Moved to G&C

Darth Paul · Post by **Darth Paul** » 2005-12-19 07:54pm

Well, as with most optimization-type problems, the answer is a solid "it depends"

You need a heuristic to help you evaluate what best means. I would probably assign positions 1 through 6 a prize value in line with how the tv tournaments work (ie in a $1M pool, first place might get $600k, etc) and add up the results for each run. My intuition says that the guy who won 4 times of 13 is best for tournament prize money, but in a cash game, the higher average player might be considered better.