Possible poker system

[AlanDB]

Hi everyone I wanted to share an idea with you and get your thoughts and feedback regarding a possible system for betting on poker at the Betfair games site. For those of you unfamiliar with it, let me give you a brief outline. On the site you are able to bet (back and lay) on the outcome of a Texas Holdem style poker game. The main difference to traditional poker playing being that you don't have a hand yourself. There are 4 hands dealt and you can back and lay against any of those hands in the game. There are 5 rounds: 1. Deal - no cards dealt. 2. Preflop - 2 cards dealt to each of the 4 hands. 3. Flop - additional 3 centre cards dealt. 4. Turn - 4th centre card dealt. 5. River - 5th centre card dealt. End of game. You are able to bet at any of the first 4 rounds. The 5th round (dealing of the river card), will determine which hand is the winner and any bets are settled. Now the idea I had was to get yourself a 'poker calculator'. This is a piece of software that will tell you the probability of a hand winning a game of poker. There are many available if you search the internet. What we could then do is calculate the actual odds of a hand winning, compared to the available Betfair odds and take advantage of any discrepancies, therefore finding value. Let me give an example. We are betting at the preflop stage so each of the 4 hands has been dealt 2 cards. Enter the values into the poker calculator and you would be given a percentage chance of each of those 4 hands winning the game. Lets concentrate on a hypothetical favourite. Say the poker calculator says that hand 4 has a 50% chance of winning the game - this equates to decimal odds of 2. If however the actual odds on Betfair are 1.81 for backing and 1.82 for laying then we can see there is value to be had here. If we were to lay this hand at 1.82 we are getting better odds than the actual chance of it losing. The reverse could be applied if the actual Betfair odds were 2.2 for example. This is purely at the conceptual stage and so far I can think of 2 possible flaws with the system: 1. Lots of people playing the Betfair poker game have already thought of this so the available odds are pretty much inline with the actual odds of each hand winning or losing. 2. Finding a piece of accurate software. I would be really keen to hear your thoughts and feedback on this :)

[WorkingForTheEnemy]

Re: Possible poker system

1. Lots of people playing the Betfair poker game have already thought of this so the available odds are pretty much inline with the actual odds of each hand winning or losing.

That will be and is your biggest problem. People will have bots hooked up working out the right odds the second the card is revealed and laying the appropiate odds.