Solved games

Poker Variants / Marcus Bateman / 15 December 2009 / Leave a Comment

One of the interesting features of poker is that certain games come into fashion, get studied by astute players for long periods, and then slowly go out of fashion as they become solved. The first game like this was arguably five card stud (of Cincinnati Kid fame), which used to be played for huge sums before an optimal strategy was adopted and the game became much harder to profit from, as even relatively weak players were reaching a high standard of play.

Limit hold'em boomed then became largely solved in the nineties, and is now hardly ever played at big limits outside of mixed games or the occasional heads up game. No limit hold'em has become much like this since around 2005, with large stake games drying up due to the best players in the game all reaching a plateau where it is largely pointless playing each other. Pot limit Omaha is currently in the middle of this cycle, being played at very high stakes, and still largely unsolved (no doubt due to the massive complexity and variance involved in this game compared to other forms of poker).

This applies to other games as much as it does to poker. Backgammon, a game that used to occupy a place similar to poker in the gambling world, became largely a solved game with the advent of computer programs that could work through the vast number of possible combinations of moves and beat all but the very best players (this being said, backgammon is still played for very large sums of money, only less than it used to be, and much less than poker is currently played for).

Despite this, there are form of poker that have been through these cycles and seem to have never been fully solved. Seven Card Stud is perhaps the best example of this. Stud is one of the most complex and difficult to master forms of poker, requiring players to exhibit skills of card counting, hand reading, close observation of player type, a full knowledge of pot odds, as well as countless other small nuances that get thrown up by a game with so many variables.

The king of the unsolved game in poker is mixed games. If they invent a computer program that can beat world class players, the last game it will be able to beat them at is mixed games. Mixed games require a player to have not only mastered all the forms of poker, but to be able to seamlessly move between them without hesitation (this may sound easy, but suddenly psychologically adjusting/reading how well others have adjusted to the ruthless world of No Limit Hold'em or Pot Limit Omaha is often hard after playing the more mathematical limit games for a while).

Poker has a wonderful capacity to evolve and change over time. Understanding what games are weak or strong, and trying to learn to make your skills as diverse as possible can really pay huge dividends in the long run, and understanding how and why games get solved is a crucial part of this.