STRATEGY pokersnowie
SNOWIE The world’s most powerful poker coaching tool is finally here, and it may change the game forever. Ross Jarvis finds out more about PokerSnowie
P
oker players are naturally suspicious of anything that threatens to help the game evolve. Doyle Brunson was castigated by the high-stakes poker world for releasing Super/System in 1979, CardRunners were accused of making online poker unbeatable when they opened in 2005 and now there’s a new kid on the block looking to take the education of poker players to the next level. PokerSnowie.com launched in August 2013, billing itself as ‘the world class Game Theory Optimal artificial intelligence engine’. That all sounds very impressive, but what does it actually mean? I spoke with PokerSnowie co-founder Johannes Levermann to find out more. German-born Levermann explains that the roots of PokerSnowie actually lay in the
52 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER
game of backgammon, ‘I used to be a professional backgammon player, I was ranked number three in the world and traveled to all the big tournaments.’ Along with grinding the backgammon circuit Levermann was also busy at work studying the game of poker, for which he developed a complex poker algorithm to complete a Masters degree – that same algorithm would go on to form the basis of PokerSnowie many years later. Before he could get to poker though, Levermann and his partner released Backgammon Snowie in 1998, which could ‘analyse your game and
the game of your opponent. You could very quickly determine who was the better player [and when] the player who is supposed to lose sees that he will just stop playing – it’s only fun if you think you have a chance.’ Backgammon Snowie was so effective as a teaching tool that it effectively killed off the burgeoning online market, where players had started to bet on matches.
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A new way of learning Poker players understandably had some concern when PokerSnowie was launched but, as Levermann explains, the two games are very