The Fish Tour - Part Four

As the concept for testing the Fish System (which is what it will be referred to from this point on) the question came up; how should the data be recorded? How, in a game like poker that has thousands if not millions of various affects on play, could accurate data be logged in order to examine the results and determine if the system works or not? Before the question could be answered, there were a couple of facts that had to be acknowledged. First, it has to be accepted that this is not a study being performed at MIT with a staff and a bankroll the size of a small country. Second, the methods used are just one-way to approach this. Keeping this in mind I decided to log information about how many hands were played out of the total number of hands in the game, how those hands were played by sticking strictly to the rules of the Fish System, and what the results were in terms of number of pots won or lost and how much money was won or lost. The first journey into the system was a play money room online, where the system was used for one hour of play. The starting dollar amount was $1000. As this was an online room and not a tournament of any sort, the number of players went up and down, but averaged seven for the hour. All told 36 hands were played (pretty fast, but online play is known for that), of which only five were not folded pre-flop. That means that 31 times I had to look at my cards and immediately fold them, unless I was in the big blind and got to see the flop for free (which did not happen this go-round.) In the next article we will take a look at each of the hands, how they were played, and what this hour of poker started to reveal about the Fish System.