Import hands from Tournaments

Cash games and tournaments are fundamentally different, but the game is still poker. Every cash game hand is independent, and therefore each time you need to make a decision, you would just analyze the hand without any additional information of what happened earlier or what may happen in the next hand. Well, except if you are trying to exploit your opponent or if someone is tilting :-)
 
In a tournament, once you start, everything is related. The main differences are that you cannot rebuy, besides a few exceptions at early stages of certain tournaments where that’s allowed, and that the chips do not correspond to real money, with the real money being given by following a prize distribution structure which is known at the beginning of the tournament.
 
I guess nothing new so far.
 
PokerSnowie, as most of you know, has been designed and trained with cash game hands in mind, and is not optimized for tournaments, since it does not take into consideration the prize distribution. This means that in certain situations, the evaluations of tournament hands may not be accurate if performed assuming it’s a cash game hand.
 
For this reason we have been reluctant to allow our customers to import and analyze tournament hands with PokerSnowie, since we wanted to avoid confusion and inaccurate evaluations. We always thought that PokerSnowie could be useful also in this area, as described in the blog post PokerSnowie for Tournament Players?, but we were unsure about the hands import.
 
On the other hand, it’s also true that in several stages of a tournament, especially in the early stages, a cash game evaluation and a proper tournament hand evaluation would be fairly similar. Additionally, even at a late stage, when the prize distribution and the status of the remaining players pool are relevant, it would still be useful to know a baseline evaluation of the hand from a cash game perspective.
 
Knowing it, in fact, would allow you to make your own considerations on how you should change the PokerSnowie evaluation, considering the extra information which PokerSnowie does not know. On top of that, a large number of customers in past years have asked us to add the ability to import tournament hands, even if they know PokerSnowie is optimized for cash games.
 
With all this in mind, we made the decision to allow the import of hands from Tournaments and Sit & Gos.
 
Any comments on this topic are very welcome, just drop us an email to support@pokersnowie.com.