PokerStove Review: A+

A handy odds calculator

PokerStove is a very handy odds calculator for Texas Hold'em Poker. Nowadays, online poker is becoming very sophisticated and everyone talks about odds, ranges and expected value. These concepts are not always intuitive and can certainly not be performed by hand.

PokerStove is a free odds calculator that all expert poker players use. It is fundamental to use this kind of poker tool if you wan to be able to assess the real value of a hand at a given street.

click to enlarge

What PokerStove does is very simple and very useful:

1. Select a number of players between two and ten, say three.
2. Select their hole cards, say A♣A♥ for player 1, 8♠7♠ for player 2 and 6♦6♥ for player 3.
3. Clicking the evaluate button calculates pot equity for each player. In our example, 66%/18%/16%.
4. You can then type in the flop cards, say 9♠6♠2♦.
5. Clicking the evaluate button refreshes the results, giving the new pot equities 4%/43%/53%.
6. Likewise adding the turn, say A♦, gives new pot equities 67%/31%/2%.

click to enlarge

PokerStove's features do not stop there. It also let you specify entire hand ranges instead of specific hole cards. Note that typing in "random" represents any random card.

Typing in ATs+ means {ATs,AJs,AQs,AKs}. The software will then ouptut the average result corresponding to these 4 hands.

Similarly 66+ symbolizes all pairs 6's and above. You can create ranges by joining such basic ranges. For example QQ+,AJs+,AQo corresponds to the range {QQ,KK,AA, AJs,AQs,AKs, AQo,AKo}.

PokerStove let you input any range you like to test. The 13 by 13 tables shown above was designed as an auxiliary input module where you can choose any group of hole cards you want.

PokerStove is optimized, i.e. designed to provide answers nearly instantaneously. The way this is done is by using so-called Monte Carlo simulations, which are statistical methods providing very fast converging approximations. Select the Monte Carlo button to get immediate responses.