How To Use PokerStove
PokerStove is a program for calculating hot-and-cold equity, providing your exact chance of winning a certain hand💲 at showdown. It’s a program that you download and run directly on your computer, as opposed to online odds calculators,💲 which means it will generally work a lot faster.
It’s a very useful tool for analyzing hands and situations away from💲 the tables, and allows you to specify a number of variables in order to recreate or simulate specific situations. Your💲 cards, your opponents’ cards, their range of potential holdings, board cards and dead cards can all be individually tweaked to💲 set up the exact scenario you wish to explore.
For instance, let’s say the player UTG raises in a 6-max limit💲 ring game, and you call from the BB with JsTs. How are you doing on a flop of Jh-7s-7d?
The answer💲 will depend on your opponent. Let’s break them down into four different styles of player:
A: very tight (raises 3% of💲 hands UTG)
B: average (raises 10% of hands UTG)
C: loose/aggressive (raises 20% of hands UTG), or
D: maniac (raises at least 50%💲 of hands UTG)
Using PokerStove you can enter these ranges, plus your exact hand and this exact flop, to find your💲 chances of winning vs. each respective type of opponent:
A: 41%
B: 61%
C: 67%
D: 73%
This is known as your hot-and-cold equity, and💲 understanding this value is a great first step in being able to figure out the best course of action. Whether💲 you should call or raise the flop in this example can be debated, but at the very least you can💲 establish that you shouldn’t fold, at least not on the flop.
Selecting a Range for an Opponent It’s rare that we💲 can put an opponent on a specific two-card combination, but narrowing down their range, or ‘Hand Distribution’, is something you💲 should be doing constantly. And with PokerStove, a little knowledge of your opponent’s range can go a long way. There💲 are a few different ways of setting your opponent’s range, the easiest one is to just type in a percentage💲 of hands they would play. For example, if you know from PokerTracker that your opponent raises pre-flop with 10% of💲 hands in this position, you can input that 10% as their range. PokerStove can convert that 10% to a range,💲 generally taking in 77+, A9s+, KTs+, QTs+, AJo+ and KQo (“77+” means any pocket pair 77 and higher, “KTs+” means💲 any suited king, with a ten or better kicker, and so on). It’s also possible to enter a range of💲 hands manually, as not all players think the same way. You can even adjust the range that PokerStove suggests after💲 you give it a percentage, adding or removing hands that you believe an opponent would or wouldn’t play.
“Enumerate All” vs.💲 “Monte Carlo” PokerStove doesn’t calculate, it simulates. So when you run the software, it will pit the hands and ranges💲 you entered, on the board that you put in (if any), randomize all the unknown variables many times, and tell💲 you how often on average the different players win. There are two ways it can do this, which are selectable💲 in the PokerStove interface: “Enumerate all” goes through every possible combination. For some scenarios this is very fast since there💲 are only a few possible combinations. Most cases involving only two players take mere fractions of a second to calculate.💲 When you have three or more players involved in a pot, the number of possible cases grows exponentially, and it💲 may take a long time for the program to run every single combination of possibilities. That’s when using the “Monte💲 Carlo” option comes in handy, as it randomizes the simulations. This means that instead of following a pattern and grinding💲 its way through every possible holding, it will randomly run simulation after simulation. As computers are so fast, a huge💲 number of samples (millions) can be simulated in around a second. This method is substituting precision for speed, but if💲 left to run for a while it will quickly stabilize towards the true value.
