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.
