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Is POFC so nearly "solved" that it's hard to have much of an edge?

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  1. #1

    Default Is POFC so nearly "solved" that it's hard to have much of an edge?

    A couple of months ago I got to the point that I was hardly playing POFC at all. The games had dried up in my circle--the bad players had figured out that they were outclassed, the good players were playing so nearly the same style that it was hard to have much of an edge, and variance can be a cruel, cruel mistress in this game.

    Then a few weeks back I got a new phone and downloaded the OYE (or YE or [chip image-YE]) app and started playing play money games. The low "buy-in" levels featured a lot of clueless players, so it was pretty easy to turn the 5000 chips they spotted me into 500,000 in a few weeks of grinding here and there when I had nothing else to do. But as I moved up the levels, I quickly found that almost everybody was playing most hands exactly as I would have. I'd hit the same wall I had hit in the home games around here: it's hard to show a consistent profit in a POFC game when everyone is playing the same style. Yes, you can have a small edge if your opponents make a few more small mistakes than you do, but the huge edges I enjoyed in this game a year and a half ago have pretty much dried up, even in the "play money" games. People have figured out the basic strategy well enough that POFC just doesn't look to me to be as profitable anymore as forms of poker (hold 'em, omaha, etc.) that feature much-less-complete information, and therefore much more room for skilled players to exploit opponents' mistakes.

    I put a lot of time into thinking about this game a while back because I had opportunities to play for cash against people who really had no idea how to play. But now it's starting to seem like the people who are still playing POFC even remotely seriously have styles so similar that investing much more time into thinking about or playing it isn't likely to be as profitable as sharpening my hold'em and omaha skills.

    What do you guys think? Am I overreacting? What has your experience been?
  2. #2
    Eric's Avatar
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    I think it is somewhere in between. Players are getting better but there as still mistakes made.

    It isn't as simple as something like blackjack where there is a basic strategy chart.
  3. #3
    I know there's a lot of arrogance in assuming that if someone is playing hands the way I would that they must be playing optimally, but a lot of sets that I used to see people misplay a year or so back are now routine for decent players. There are still sets that don't seem to have a clearly best line, but most competent players I encounter are setting most of their hands as I would most of the time. Furthermore, the play after the set is much more widely understood. People still overplay hands sometimes (hell, I know I do), but I almost never see anyone take a bad passive line; the overwhelming majority of mistakes I see decent players make are mistakes of aggression, which I'd argue are almost always less damaging than mistakes of passivity. When I first started playing a lot of POFC, there were players whose FL percentages were ridiculously low because they played too passively both on the set and on the draws, but now almost everyone I play against has a good FL %.

    I don't think the game is completely solved yet, but I think that the gap between a top POFC player and a merely competent one has shrunk so much that the elite player's edge is much smaller than the edge an elite hold'em or omaha player has against a merely competent player of those games. POFC's big problem is that there is so much information available during the hand that if you have a reasonable understanding of basic strategy it's hard to make big mistakes--you can make smaller mistakes, granted, but those aren't usually catasptrophic. Whereas, in hold'em or omaha, middle-of-the-road players have so much less information available that they can (and do) make big mistakes against top players much more often.

    Even players who consider themselves "world class" at poker games of much-less-complete information can make huge mistakes in a way that just never happens in POFC. Consider this hand, one of my favorite hold'em hands of all time, where Tom Dwan uses his knowledge of the other players and of the spot to get both Peter Eastgate and Barry Greenstein to make huge mistakes:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxo1mAng090

    But in POFC everybody always knows where they are and what their opponents are up to, so no one can make a mistake of this nature or this magnitude. It's hard to grind out a profit at any kind of poker, but it seems like it has to be more achievable at a game in which people have to guess what's going on than in a game in which the information is available to everyone.
  4. #4
    Eric's Avatar
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    Yeah, there's no bluffing in pofc.

    In some ways it is more like blackjack but with it doesn't have a simple basic strategy chart like 21.

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