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.
