Brags. Beats. Battlestar Galactica.

So I got a request for my next blog topic and I will tackle it here. This is from snowboard789

make a blog post about how possible it is for someone to decode and solve TD as a game with decision trees etc and then applying them to real play. there is a rumour in 2p2 that thats what some russian guy dont remember the name (famous) did. 

Also with this possibility talk about what you think the future of this game could be in terms of investing in it ie learning it so you can make money for years to come (compared to other forms of poker) and the possibility of TD dies sometime soon.  

Addressing the idea of Triple Draw being solvable, I'm not convinced that it is easily solvable by just decoding the decision trees. It is a vastly complicated game given that there are more decisions beyond just betting. It is also very inconvenient that equity is really hard to figure out given that you have to work out the correct drawing strategy to work out equity, and you have to work out equities to get the correct drawing strategy. It is not like Hold'em where equity is a pretty simple constant thing that you can work your strategy around. 

I'm fairly sceptical about the rumour. If he has solved TD then why isn't he playing it 24/7? It seems fairly unlikely that a single person can make much progress unless he has the resources and team of the Polaris guys (LHE bot). If he did, surely he would be fairly well known for doing so. Anyway, I will believe it until I see something that strongly suggests this has happened.

In terms of investing in it, I don't think the rumour that someone might have solved the game changes what I think about this matter much; it's negligible. If you had asked me whether it was worth learning on April 14th, 2011, I would have said yes, and that it was a massive gold mine. However, both Black Friday and FTP going down have changed the situation considerably.

Right now I'm quite confident that it's good to learn, but not definite. The games are nowhere near as frequent as they used to be, but there are still a fair amount of 10/20 games. I don't know how tough these are but getting good enough to beat them would get you to a profit level that is far better than any equivalent stake in any other game. 

However, not everyone can just pick up TD and learn it at the same rate, and this is something that depends on the player. I've seen some who just have a knack for it, but some who take longer to get used to the whole thing.

Ultimately, one of the best reasons to learn the game is enjoying it, and TD is way more enjoyable than other games (not just my opinion, most people agree with this and I could write a post about what mechanics make this true). Enjoying learning and playing something makes the process a hell of a lot quicker.

It's interesting the idea that the game could die at some point. It's a fair possibility and there are two extreme factors that are at odds with TD. One is that it's immensely addictive that a lot of people come into it, and the other is that bad players will get rinsed in this game faster than any other. A game is no longer fun if you're getting destroyed and there are only good regs left. I honestly couldn't predict what happens to TD in the future but hopefully there are still occasional influxes of big money to keep the game going. 

If anyone has any questions or different requests for topics, feel free to comment below.