I've been thinking some about randomness lately and how it occurs naturally.
For example in hold'em there's a lot of randomness just in the cards. I don't mean that the shuffle is clean and your hand is random. I mean kind of within the hand.
Suppose you decide you want to vary your use of continuation betting on the flop. You decide that instead of cbet 100% of the time you'll cbet 75% of the time. ok, now how to determine the 75%.
Well that's where your cards come in. In hold'em there's the two cards. You get one first then the next one. Let's call the second card the "top" card.
In the top card of course there are 4 suits. So you could randomize your flop cbet by using the rule "if the top card is a non-heart then cbet". That's pretty easy and when playing live it's useful because you've already put your down cards into your memory. So you don't have to remember some additional second hand off a watch or something.
It works with the distribution of pocket pairs as well. Suppose you decide you are going to LRR with Aces some amount of the time in early position. ok, well there's 6 ways of course to make AA. Of those there's 1 way to make the black aces. So 1/6 about 17% of the time you could LRR with the black Aces. If this seems high you can cut it in half by using black aces with the top card the ace of spades. Now you're down to about 8%.
In addition to your cards there are other natural sources of randomness. On PokerStars and other sites there's a hand # in the top left corner for each hand. Well you can use the last 2 digits of this number as a percentage random number.
When playing live your seat number is typically random. It's just the open seat at your table when you arrive. So half the time you're in an even seat 2,4,6,8,10 and half in odd 1,3,5,7,9. You could use the hour of the clock time which is also even or odd to determine a match half the time. For example 10:25 in seat 4 is a match. 10:25 in seat 7 is not a match. 11:33 in seat 9 is a match. Using the example above with AA you could use + seat match to cut your LRR frequency in half again black aces + top card spade + seat number match comes out to about 4% of the time if you want to do something pretty infrequently.
