Like Calculatem Pro, the tool displays both your win odds, pot odds and the odds of drawing to different types of hands on the river as well as real time betting advice. Holdem Genius also displays a number of unique statistics such as your outs for each type of hand on the next card, the top 25 pairs of pocket cards that can combine with the board and where your hand is ranked in comparison to all possible pocket cards that might be held.
- Includes a wide range of real time poker odds and hand strength metrics including win odds, pot odds and your outs and the odds of drawing to different types of hands.
- Includes a detailed presentation of your outs, showing which cards will improve your hand to various hand types (e.g. to a flush or a straight).
- Shows the top 25 pocket hands that can combine with the board to form the best hands.
- Shows where you hand is ranked among all possible pocket cards.
- Gives real time betting advice based on your win odds and pot odds.
- The betting advice is configurable so you can tighten or loosen the advice both post-flop, pre-flop and based on position.
- Collapsible windows allow you to see as much or as little of the metrics as you desire.
Holdem Genius displays a wide range of odds and statistics relating to hand strength. As well as your win odds and pot odds your will also see the odds of making different types of hands at the river (e.g. flush, full house, ...). The tool also has a very detailed presentation of your outs. Your outs are displayed relative to the hand they will enable you to form. For example you can see your different outs that may let you form a flush or a straight. You can then total these outs to see the number of cards that will improve your hand. In totaling your outs you have the option to either include or ignore the outs that will enable you to form a pair, therefore enabling a sort of discounting outs so to speak on the fly. This breakdown of your outs for different hand types is one of the most detailed presentation of outs available in such a tool.
In addition to these metrics, you will also see a display of the top 25 pocket cards that can combine with the board to produce the best hands possible. In the diagram above to the left of the table you can see that on the board presented, there is only one possible set of pocket aces that could form trips, one set of pocket sevens and three sets of pocket sixes. These top hands let you to quickly evaluate hands that may combine strongly with the board and may help the process of starting to read players hands. You can see the hands your should be watching out for and see if a players actions through the hand may be consistent with them holding one of these sets of pocket cards. Another related metric provided is the rank of your current hand. Such a hand rank can be viewed as another form of hand strength While you win odds will tell you the chance you hold the best hand by the river, your hand rank will tell you at what percentile of all possible hands is your current made hand.
On a side note here, I've personally looked a bit into game theory applications of poker. This is an area of mathematics that attempts to formulate optimal strategies of play that can not be exploited against a perfect opponent. It is common in game theory to reduce a full poker game to a simpler game to be able to mathematically solve the game and gain insights that may transfer to full forms of poker. I believe such theories have been studied quite extensively by high class players such as Chris Ferguson.
A common formulation of poker in game theory is to reduce hand strength to a uniform number between 0 and 1 and look at the betting sequences that are optimal based on the strength of your number. I have often contemplated that a hand rank such as presented here may be more relevant to such a problem that win odds as a hand rank percentage should be roughly uniform between 0 and 100. As such I can see the sort of potential that having this sort of hand rank information may provide.
Similarly to Calculatem Pro, Holdem Genius will translate its hand strength metrics into real time betting advice. This betting advice is also configurable so you can set the tool to tighten or loosen its post-flop and pre-flop requirements separately. Additionally, you can adjust the pre-flop advice based on position. For example you may want the tool to tighten up its requirements straight after the blinds and loosen up on the dealer button. I think the real advantage of such betting advice is to allow new players to more quickly hone their sense of the strength of their hand and what this may mean in terms of how far they should be going with such a hand. Such an understanding of hand strength is not the only component to good poker strategy, but is certainly a necessary one that a beginner will need to learn early in the piece.
Holdem Genius's interface is designed to provide as much or as little information as you want displayed and gives the ability to really minimize the screen space the tool takes up. Your win odds and betting advice is displayed on the table, meaning it does not take any additional screen space to display. Your various odds and metrics of hand strength then appear in various windows down the right and left sides of the table. You can turn these various windows on and off, causing them to appear or disappear, and as such can display as little or as many of these metrics as you want.
Holden Genius offers a free 1 year license if you sign up to a poker room and make a deposit through the links on their site. There is also the option to buy a 1 year license directly. Their website offers quite a bit of more detailed information on the tool and some of its unique properties, so I encourage you to head over and take a look to learn more about what the tool has to offer.
