Determining the odds in a game like no-limit Texas Hold'em can require some complicated calculations.

There many poker programs that can calculate poker odds. Most of these poker simulators use a general purpose algorithms to perform the poker odds calculations. This generic approach doesn't take advantage of the full range of possible optimizations. To explore the effect of global optimizations, a preflop evaluator which can fully enumerate complex preflop situations was developed. This "zealous" evaluator is able to compute an exact solution roughly 100 times faster than any general purpose evaluator.

PokerStove is the result of this work. PokerStove is a poker calculator for Texas Hold'em. It is currently available free of charge, with no spyware, spam or other annoyances. Download and enjoy.

If you have any questions or comments please send an email with [POKERSTOVE] in the subject to:

feedback at pokerstove dot com.

Guest Article: "Combinatorics Resources For Aspiring Math-Geek Poker Players"

Lately there's been a surge of interest in combinatorics by poker players aspiring to improve their game through ranged mathematical analysis. A little bit of combinatorics goes a long way. Over time, familiarity with the computations will teach you some guidelines that you can apply in many situations at the tables.

Where should I start? Start with the Wikipedia entry for combinatorics. Once you've learned the math behind this concept, take a moment and pokerstove. Take some situations with a full, 5 card board at the river and put them in, along with your hand and the range of your opponents hands. Run the percentages to see what it looks like. For an example of a situation, see "Combinatorics in Texas Hold'em Poker".

The best way to make sure you understand the math is to compute your equity by hand and then compare your results to pokerstove's numbers. At first, you don't want to do anything to complicated or you'll be doing math for hours. Start with five card boards and compute the only logical ranges on the river.

Once you've got the hang of it, you can start to look for opportunities when you play poker online to hunt for situations in which you're a strong favorite but you might otherwise have just checked the river because you don't have the first, second, or third nuts. When you bet these situations, especially in Limit Hold'em, you're picking up significant money even when you get beat.

Once you know the math, you'll realize the benefits are not just for Texas Hold'em online or live. Learning combinatoric poker odds is useful for other games as well, such as video poker, backgammon, and others.

Finally, if you want to start exploring combinatorics through different scenarios in code, you should check out the new series from Coding The Wheel about coding up combinatorics tools using freely available code libraries.

- Shabbir Imber Safdar