Show HN: Floptimal – Preflop ranges reimagined
floptimal.com
floptimal.com
Presumably, this is for people who are already advanced to get a little bit better? Otherwise, if you want to level up my poker game I would need a few lower rungs on the ladder.
But I think even as someone who has used PokerStove in the past, and has programmed some range evaluators, the UI is pretty intimidating for me.
Equity and range evaluators got a lot less useful because people figured how to make software that solves the full (simplified) game tree. This is a superior approach to anything other than all-in spots (which have game tree of one nodes.)
Most serious players these days primarily use software like pio and monker because the competition has gotten tougher and old equity calculators are like using a graphing calculator vs a
Not seeing a color legend on mobile but I can reason it out; might be a helpful addition for tournament players who are newer to these concepts.
(Explanation for peanut gallery: if you are playing tournament Texas hold’em poker and have relatively few chips, the game becomes simpler that at other stages of the tournament: you either wager all your chips immediately after given your first choice in the hand or fold your chips. The optimal play is far closer to a math problem than most poker situations; these charts help describe it concisely for people to mentally cache prior to play.
Mobile isn't something we've focused on too much, so the UI's a bit small, but you should see the legend below the action bar on the left. Let me know if it's somehow not showing up at all for you though.
Too many websites offer 'all cookies' and 'dig into this menu to turn off the cookies you don't want'. Obviously the latter is a huge pain, and the goal is to get people to just accept all cookies.
The accept only required cookies is refreshing in this web full of dark pattern. Even tought it's not the default choice, the button is bigger than the accept all cookies button and it doesn't leads to a jungle of toggles.
Thanks for respecting us !
It's bad enough when every site makes you go through and pick exactly which invasive cookies you don't want, but I'd like to call out Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange as a particularly bad offender here. They present the dialog each and every time you visit one of their sites. It's beyond annoying, and, were it easily possible without sacrificing my ability to decline their cookies, I'd block that dialog element entirely. Maybe this is a good job for a browser extension?
I've played online tournaments for a month or two and can tell exactly what this is saying. So it's not exactly high level.
Where did you get the data for this?
However, there are a lot of people (like me) who could be educated a little bit and would then be happy to use/pay for a tool like this. I wouldn't ignore these folks because they could increase the market size by 2-3x.
It looks like the first page is now a landing page that helps get people properly onboarded, which is great.
What's the nash distance here? Can I assume you are tight enough these results should be the same as piosolver etc?
Any thoughts on supporting cash games (w/ various rake levels, 6max or 9max) or deeper stacks?
Thoughts on lifetime subscriptions?
This is a solid competitor to piosolver etc
Launching anything is extremely hard, congratulations! I hope this goes well for you, I do like the layout of information, even though (as others have already commented) I don't understand what many of the tables are meant to represent. Very clean, if inscrutable!
Just to share a little background: our initial designs were of a round poker table but ultimately ditched it for a couple key reasons. We ran into usability issues (eg, the re-raising scenarios were difficult to display clearly, and it took too long for users to read/absorb the summary of action), and the action input wasn't as streamlined (namely, it required far more mouse and eye movement darting around the circle).
It took many iterations to land on what we currently have — the vertical list from early position to late position that eliminates positions in the re-raise rounds — and it proved to be the most efficient for inputting, absorbing, and clearing table action. Ultimately we made this tradeoff to value power usage over first time usage, but we hope to continue improving it and making it easier for first time users as well.
Good luck!
I expect a round poker table if the software actually plays poker or if it's some kind of hand-commentary replayer. Not for things like this.
Also will you implement the other sub-games such as short stacks and other games? It would be very valuable to explore the differences.
also, it's a bit more complex because its not heads up so i don't think there is a proper equilibrium. but i've seen a lot of preflop ranges that for these small stacks that claim to be solved using computers. i guess with multiway they use a lot of abstractions to make the problem simpler.
On the other hand, you can try to tailor your strategy to be maximally exploitative of the other players at the table, but doing this can be hard since often it can take a large number of hands to gauge what kind of player somebody is. On the other hand, GTO strategies are naive in the sense that you don't need to know anything about your opponents to guarantee that you Breakeven.
Can the best players still be profitable against computers?
Heads Up No limit is not solved, but machines are so good at it now that the world's top humans lost money to a machine when this was last attempted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluribus_(poker_bot)
In multi-seat games, like the ones Floptimal is designed for, an AI has the problem that rationally the humans should all work together to knock it out, simply because it's obviously stronger than they are. The humans needn't cheat, they just choose to take a different line against the bot than they'd take against other humans, so that the bot accumulates money much more slowly than the dominant human player.
Perhaps augmented reality experiences could help professionals play more hands of live poker, balancing volume with integrity of the games.
You could start off with the basic "if you're dealt these cards, should you hold/fold?" and then layer on additional complexity in terms of stack size, position, etc. That would make it less intimidating/multivariate.
Can you explain what features you are keeping behind a paywall and why? This looks like something that could really help a lot of people, that would not have high ongoing costs, and that therefore could make a great business.
Only question — what is your moat? Not to say you can't succeed without a moat from day one, but it changes the calculus on growth/revenue (in favor of growing faster to capture the market, and then iterating on revenue later once you're the main player).
The features behind a pay wall are the “reaction ranges” for all stack sizes other than 15bb. This is the ability to put in table action and see the resulting data/strategies. Generating that data is very time consuming, requires significant computing hardware, and we continually generate more of it in order to improve the quality of the existing data sets as well as to create more of it (eg more stack sizes). The primary value of our initial offering is rooted in this data, and poker players are willing to pay for it. Historically it’s been prohibitively expensive, though, and a big goal for us was to lower the barrier and make it more accessible.
Our actual moat, though, is the technology and design. The ease of entering and changing table action, how quickly we load the data visualized in all these different ways, the combined aesthetics + logic behind the color schemes… these are the kinds of things we’ve come to expect in consumer technology but hadn’t yet reached the realm of poker tech. We believe that these aspects of Floptimal are groundbreaking within poker.
We created our app to make it easy and accessible for poker players who aren't necessarily as computer savvy as the average HN'er, so our focus has been on presentation and the quick ability to dig through the data by hand, as a study tool. If you're interested in the raw data there are tools such as PIO (https://www.piosolver.com/), monker (https://monkerware.com/), and Simple (https://simplepoker.com/en/Solutions/Simple_Preflop_Holdem) that give you all sorts of control and more data than you could hope for. But they do take a very long time to run and need some legit hardware to do it, which is why another common approach is to sell the data. (We use monker and some proprietary things to generate and validate our data.)