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.
A: 41%
B: 61%
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.
“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.
