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.
