d00rman

d00rman is a tool to help make you a better hold'em player. Specifically, it's a tool to help randomize how you play your preflop starting hands.

Easy. First, sign up for an account -- just enter your email address and create a password (your email address will act as your username). Once you've activated your account, log in and set your preferences (hands, positions, etc.). Then just sit back and let d00rman remind you when to raise, limp or fold according to the instructions you've given.

Before setting hand preferences, it's a good idea to layout a general strategy. First, decide which hands you're going to play from which positions. E.g., "From early position, I want to raise premium pairs and big aces most of the time (limping the rest), raise middle pairs some of the time (limping the rest), and raise small pairs some of the time (folding the rest)" or "From late position, I want to raise with the top 50% of hands most of the time (limping the rest), and raise with the top 10% of hands even more frequently (limping the rest)."

Once you have a general randomizing strategy in place, start entering your preferences. Say you're going to play your premium pairs and big aces the same from early and middle position, you'd click on the appropriate cells in the hand matrix, select your raise, limp and fold percentages, check off 'Early Position' and 'Middle Position', and hit 'Save'. You'll see on the confirmation screen that the hands you've just saved are highlighted.

If you're going to be entering preferences for large groups of hands, you'll save a lot of time by using the hand group menus. The first menu, 'General Hand Types', selects groups of hands based on common characteristics (e.g., all pairs, all offsuit one gaps, all suited aces). The other three select groups of hands based on different hand ranking methodologies (Sklansky/Karlson, Pokerroom, and ProPokerTools.com). Use the latter three when you want to select the top X% of hands.

Randomizing your play is important when playing against observant (i.e., tough) opponents, since otherwise they'll be able to accurately deduce your hand ranges from your betting patterns. Randomizing your starting hand selection is a key component of switching up your play in general.

Randomizing your starting hand selection effectively is difficult in practice, because:

• It's hard to remember how often you want to mix up your betting actions for each hand, especially when you factor in mixing up your actions based on position. E.g., "Do I raise 50% of the time with T9s on the button, or only 20%...?"
• In the heat of the moment, it's tempting to under or over randomize according to your playing tendencies. E.g., a loose player who's decided to limp 87s in early position only 10% of the time will likely end up doing it far more often, and a tight player who's decided to limp AA in early position 10% of the time will likely end up doing it far less.

For live play, using the second hand of your watch as a randomizer is a good option. But it requires you constantly looking at your watch, remembering the second hand info, and then doing awkward arithmetic. E.g., "Ok, I want to raise with JJ 80% of the time in middle position, so that's 48 seconds, it's :56 now, so I limp. But wait, do I limp from :01 to :12, or from :49 to :60? Think I actually limped from :01 to :12 last time..." As an alternative, you could multiply the last digit of the current minute (or second) by 10, reducing the complexity of the arithmetic.

For online play, d00rman is a MUCH easier and effective alternative. Set your preferences as granular as you'd like, then glance over at d00rman when it's your turn to act.

Randomizing your play based on the suit of your first (or second) card is certainly simpler than using your watch, but your options are limited to either a 3:1 distribution (e.g., spades) or a 1:1 distribution (e.g., black suits). Furthermore, it effectively limits you to two actions per hand -- raise/call, call/fold, or raise/fold. Expanding your randomization method to the suits of both cards expands your options, but it also presents the memory/arithmetic/consistency difficulties with using your watch.

d00rman is currently free. At some point, the site may be divided into a subscription site (e.g., $10 per month) and a free site. The pay site would have full functionality and would eventually add the ability to program preferences for reraising, three betting, cold calling, etc. preflop, as well as randomizing play of hands postflop, too. The free site would likely have limited functionality (e.g., hand limits, position limits).

d00rman is a play on 'dorman' which is an anagram of 'random'. It's 'd00rman' instead of 'doorman' because the doorman.com domain was already taken.