Poker (e.g. Texas Hold’em) is a game of instinct and a form of adversarial sport, and so would never boil down to a cold calculation of optimal moves such as in chess. The challenge in modeling human behavior in such multi-player contest underlies the limits of analytics for this kind of games. This is fundamentally the same challenge as predicting the stock market and political elections, except those real life circumstances involve even more players of free will and are exponentially more complex.
Nevertheless, there is value in understanding the odds of hands in different circumstances. Good poker players have heuristics that guide them when evaluating the odds of their hands. For example, any experienced poker player would know that if you’re on a flush draw on the flop, your chance of hitting a flush is roughly 1/3. And if you have 2 high cards in your hand and if a high pair can win it for you, then your chance is even better (better than even). But such approximations, which are also prone to human tendency to err, are no longer necessary when everyone has a supercomputer in their hands. In any event, a good poker odds calculator can help us evaluate past hand as well as potential future hands we are curious about. Such exercises are bound to improve our intuition in the game and lead to better performance over time.
Looking at all the free poker odds calculator in the market, I have not found one that checks all my boxes. First of all, I want to know the exact odds when ALL the outcomes are evaluated, not some Monte Carlo approximation. Given 4 cards in a heads-up situation, which is one of the most computationally intensive scenario, there are 1,712,304 possible outcomes on the board. It should be possible for a modern smartphone to evaluate all the outcomes within 1 second if the algorithm is optimized enough. There is no need to settle for approximation when our feeble minds already intuitively know roughly the odds for most of the situations. But even for apps that seems to be evaluating all the outcomes, they are often churning out incorrect answers. Most of the time the error is minor but once in a while I see errors larger than 1%, which is unacceptable to me. The correctness problem is acute when you think about the real money (sometimes “real serious” money) at stake. Secondly, I want the User Interface to be clean and nice so that a user can easily test many different scenarios to develop and improve his/her intuition. Thirdly the computation has to be as fast as possible, for the same reason. Correctness should not come at the expense of speed, at least not to a point when it affects user experience.
The need for correct answers all the time is not one I would compromise on. When I played around with the apps in the market, I have not found one that churns out precisely the correct answer all the time. In fact, their answers are almost always slightly off. In the end, unless I get to see the source code of these apps, I would never be 100% confident in the correctness of their answers. So it became clear to me one day that I would have to write my own odds calculator in the end.
This app does everything I desire in a poker odds calculator, although I think some more fine tuning can be done on the user interface. But it is already very easy to use and quite a joy to play with. I decided to share it with the world of poker lovers.
Make no mistake though, the value of the analytical part of the game shall not be overstated because ultimately this is a contest between human beings, and so adeptness in navigating the nature of human psychology and intuition in “reading the field” are always more important. But just as an NFL team spend money and effort on its kicker, a relatively minor part of the game but sometimes on the margin decides a game, I hope this app will help you on the margin in those hands when it matters.
I am dedicated to the correctness of the calculator and for that I have built extensive testing tools to verify the answers. But to err is to be human and should you find anything wanting in this app, please feel free to write to me at hayechan@gmail.com.
Easy Consensus 