We remember asking ourselves that in October of 2006. At the time, it didn’t seem like such a tough task — a month or two of work to design the test, create the analyzer, and finish the web site. Well, 18 months and about 20,000 hours later, here we are.
The two toughest parts of the whole process were:
- Designing 50 poker hands that sufficiently tested every poker skill imaginable. The hands had to be designed to accomplish this task for all different levels and styles of players. Therefore, we needed some easy situations and some hard situations. Plus, some situations that were most likely to trap over-aggressive players, and some computerized opponents that were meant to push tight-passive players around. The test alone took us 3 months to write, and it is still being refined.
- Analyzing poker mistakes that don’t just happen in a vacuum. Bluffing and slowplaying are prime examples. When is it wrong to slowplay? When is it wrong to bluff? That depends on a lot of factors — who are you trying to bluff, how many chips do they have, how many times have you tried to bluff recently. We had to write our analyzer to adjust for all these different factors and more.
