Acespade Pro 2002 Hold Em

TESTING TOOL PLAY MODES

CASE- In this Play mode, User deals, in turn, one card at a time from the entire exposed deck to each player in order to set the beginning hands pre-flop. You have the option to deal an Unknown card to any player, if you choose. Play then proceeds as if a Normal game, with some twists. You now control the actions of every player, at every street. You also choose every card that is dealt at every street

Your hand is still the only hand that triggers the Advisor popup window if your action is "incorrect." This, however, seems a little overdoing it, since you control all of the actions. One example: on the river it suggested that the human player go for a check-raise. and I "fell" for it, making the next person bet into me. Another irritation: there are STILL delays between hands, as if the software calculates something. Some of these are processed slowly, evidently. Also, when the Advisor displays the hand rankings pre-flop, it only ranks the hands that have been acted upon so far (whether known or not), and ranks based ONLY on those hands. If a hand hasn't been gotten to yet, such as the button, or is in a blind that hasn't had to act yet, they are not included in the rankings. So, in a current 8-player game (I folded one original exposed player), there is a ranking 1st through 5th which ignores the buttons and the two blinds.

One big problem, in my opinion- if you assign an Unknown card to a player, you cannot assign a second, known card to that player- they automatically get an Unknown card. In addition, when actually running through the play of the hands for analysis, you cannot Peek Others for those unknown hands. yet you still have to make a playing decision for the Unknown hands.

After the flop, when Hint is triggered, the blue windows displaying each hand's relative strength will appear. yet you still can't see what's going on. This renders the analysis of the hand almost useless- how can you learn anything about playing strategy if all of the Unknown players are betting blind, in a sense? Also, the strength ratings make no sense.

After walking through the entire hand, without ever seeing the cards of the Unknown players, the remaining unused cards reappear in the middle of the table, along with the entire 5-card board. Only the players that didn't fold still remain.

You are then presented with three choices for assigning cards to the unknown players- Unknown Hand, Unknown Card and Do Not Care. Unknown Hand assigns a two-card hand immediately. Unknown Card now works differently- instead of assigning one card at a time around the table, you now assign two cards to each player before moving on. I'm not sure why this change in process occurs, but it's a welcome one. In addition, you can now assign an unknown card and a known card to the same player- again, a welcome change, if a confusing switch. Once you assign all of the cards, the remaining deck disappears and the current winning hand is displayed. You can then run Continue, Play It Again, Replay Mine or Stop. Playing again keeps all of the cards you just set, including the new? Unknown cards, and lets you walk through the hand again, step by step as before. The 5 board cards can not be changed, they appear automatically. The replay also brings back into the game the folded hands, letting you decide to take whatever action you want with them.

Do Not Care was evidently literal- two unknown cards show in that player, then the game zips to the river and ends. You can assign cards, then winner is displayed based on newly assigned cards, and then you can replay or end.

After an extended replay/add cards/replay analysis (see the Advice section), I finally gave up without ever finding out what the hidden cards were.

Another problem- you cannot go back to the Case hand that you are currently analyzing and make a simple change before reanalyzing. Instead, you have to redistribute all of the cards again and start over. Very tedious.

A bigger problem is that the calculations for hand action value differ from what was given during ring play, though they didn't seem to change from Play it Again to Play it Again. When I recreated the Qc 9c UTG vs. 8d 6h hand from the regular play example that I described above, the preflop Call and Raise were both -$0.20 (which certainly seems correct for the comment, but incorrect in that they have the exact same expectation).

WATCH- This game "type" allows you to let the computer play all of the hands, face up, in a continuous manner. If you don't want the hands to run automatically, a setting in Option forces you to trigger the next hand. No advice is available.

One problem- There seems to be no way to force a delay between hands that is applied universally. Some hands seem to stall and make decisions, then three or more hands fold in a blur of action (before you can see their cards). Even the max 9999 setting on Option/Preference/"View time for each hand" doesn't change this. And the ones that stall are doing so for no discernable reason. Example: QToff in early position is facing a raise UTG from a Solid player with KK. There are several whole seconds of delay before the QT decides to fold. That decision should have taken ONE of the game's milliseconds.

Overall, I noticed a significant delay repeatedly, if not consistently, while playing the various game modes. It seems as if the system's calculations really bog down when a particular player faces an action (bet, raise) from a preceding player, even if the play should be obvious such as a fold.

These Play options are the closest that Acespade's software gets to Wilson's testing tools.

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