Saturday, September 22, 2007

Question about odds to win? Throw it on the stove.

If you ever wanted to know if you were ahead or behind in a hand you can run it through Poker Stove. It is a free piece of software where you can enter multiple hands to find out who was ahead pre-flop. Or you can add in board cards to find out where you stood after the flop or the turn. I had heard Nick talking about it before but I didn't realize it is FREE FREE FREE! Just use an world wide web browser and enter H-T-T-P colon forward slash forward slash W-W-W period PokerStove period C-O-M as the web address and you will be able to copy the software from their server to your personal computer.

One of the best features is that it will allow you to run a hand against a range of hands of an opponent. For example, someone raises, you pick up QQ and re-raise, then they push all in. Should you call? Well it depends on pot odds and the range of hands you put them on. If you think they would push in that situation with AK, AA, KK, QQ, or JJ then you can run the numbers to see if you were getting correct pot odds to call against their range. Neat!

It will also let you pit hole cards against a random hand to judge relative strength so if you are playing heads up against someone who will push all in blind every single time, you can use PokerStove to see where you stand in the hand. As an example I've listed some various hole card combinations against a single random hand and their percentage to win.

85.2% AA The mother of all hands is only about 5:1 over a random hand.
65.8% AKs or AKo The hand that "never wins" is about 2:1 over a random hand
59.9% As5s Martini special
54.1% Ks3s The Muncie
54.0% Js8s SpainR
51.8% Q7o The computer hand that was supposed to be the Mendoza line of Hold'em
46.0% J3s or J3o J-trey
38.8% 64s or 64o T. G. I. Don't play this crappy hand
35.2% 52s or 52o (for illustration purposes only, this hand should not be played)
34.6% 72o So called "worst hand" in Hold'em
32.3% 32o Nut low still only a 1:2 dog against a random hand heads up

Download it and give it a try. It's fun and educational!

5 comments:

royalbacon said...

They hate Macs.

jtrey333 said...

J3 almost 50% against a random all-in hand. Glorious!

Sushi Cowboy said...

Hmmm...that's weird. Pokerstove runs on my MacBook. (cough)VMware(cough)

Sushi Cowboy said...

Don't forget that J3 soooooooted gets you those extra points to bring you up to 48.2%!

Marshall said...

Wow my hand is truly horrific.