Many decades of advances in technology, game theory, and probability theory have provided the contemporary poker player with a very different experience of the card table than had their ancestors, or indeed even those who first encountered the rise of a professional cardroom poker game fifty years ago. With the click of a few keys, it’s possible to have at your fingertips a hand equity chart, a pot odds calculator, a table showing best preflop play for every starting hand etc.
The tools available to help you improve your poker skills seem therefore to promise an immediate route to “poker as a numbers game”. The calculation of the probability of the cards you need to win appears to be simplified to a level no more complex than working out how much change you should give someone, or what is the most cost efficient way to buy something from a shop.
While so much time and energy is devoted to discussing the numbers, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that poker is a game far more complex than just numbers. So in the end, the question becomes whether or not poker calculators and strategy tables actually do anything to increase one’s chances of winning or if they are simply a tool for creating the illusion of control in a very random and chaotic game. To answer that question, you have to understand what these tools actually do.
What Poker Calculators Are Really Showing You
Poker calculators are in reality nothing more than probability calculators. They use the deck that you input and make thousands of virtual draws based on that deck and the hands you input. Then they determine the probability of one hand winning against another. Thus if you input your pocket aces against the field, the calculator will tell you the probability of the aces winning against the other possible hands. A poker calculator can also be very useful in a more complex situation, for example in a multi player ring game where each player has two or more community cards. In this situation the calculator can determine the odds of winning the hand.
There is an awful lot of thought given to trying to figure out the best play in almost every situation. Why is that? Because poker is a game of chance and we don’t always make decisions based on certainties. We often choose to act in a way that will increase the expected value of our hand, instead of playing it in a way that guarantees a certain outcome. If we were to choose to act based on certainties, we would be making money. The calculator tells us the chances of winning, but it can’t control fate. An 80% chance to win only means we lose 1 time out of 5, but we all know how often it feels like we lose that one time.
Why Strategy Tables Are So Popular
Alongside calculators, strategy tables or charts help players make certain decisions in the game. Players make so many decisions in a given hand, having to reference the game in the back of our head in relation to our opponents and position at the table can be a tedious task and may lead to some wrong decisions that a young player shouldn’t have to deal with. I think all of us have had marginal hands come round the circle in which we aren’t quite sure if we should call, re-raise or fold, and in many cases a table or chart can specify which option is the best given our hand strength in relation to our position in the hand. Instead of guessing whether to play a marginal hand, a player can consult a chart that says something like:
- Raise with premium pairs
- Fold weak hands in early position
- Play suited connectors from late position
Poker is a strategy game and that is why competitive environments such as online poker rooms remain the best testing ground for practical skill. There are many situations where poor play can lead to overlooking important details. The tables help to avoid this and the result is that you will act more like an advanced player and less like a beginner. The tables represent the basic rules of the game and serve as a training aid to help you learn these rules before you are able to come up with your own strategy. It is quite obvious that the tables only cover a small part of the game.
Where Pure Math Starts to Break Down
Where a calculator or table fails is in that they assume a game of poker played in a vacuum. However in a real game, a poker table is never ever normal. Players will bluff, overplay, trap and make many other insane decisions in between hands. In fact, the idea of a truly random and evenly distributed Poker game is almost always broken by the involvement of human nature. And that is something that no table nor calculator can account for.
Let me give you an example from the strategy table that we just looked at in depth. So there we have a recommendation to fold to a raise in early position, but this also doesn’t take into account that your opponents could be quite passive in the next position and so on or that the table overall is playing in a very aggressive manner. Following a table blindly won’t take into account many different situations. As we all know, Poker is a very strategic game but at the same time it’s also a very psychological game. It’s crucial to read the other players at the table, to spot patterns and to adjust to the table dynamics, as well as knowing the pot odds of the hand that you’re playing.
Where Calculators Actually Help
I would say that the people who think that poker tools (such as poker calculators and tables of probability) are not very useful, are basically restricted to basic strategy. These tools are not crucial to understand basic strategy but they are also not particularly relevant for learning the basics of the game. That being said, I believe that they are very useful for newcomers that want to learn more about the strategy of the game and advanced players that have a good basic strategy that they want to improve. Basic strategy is something that you cannot memorise; it is an intuition based on maths that you can get when you incorporate the poker tools in your understanding of the game. Thus, basic strategy with the aid of poker calculators and tables helps you develop an understanding of the probabilities and the tendencies of the game which become clearer and clearer as the number of dealt hands increases.
Using the history of dealt hands we can plug in the numbers into the calculator to see if we made the right decision passing or playing. This helps us to understand the EV or expected value. Eventually, many experienced players stop relying directly on calculators because they internalize these probabilities through practice. The math becomes instinctive.
Why Experience Still Matters
Poker is a dynamic game of knowledge and adaptability. You must be familiar with the mathematical aspects of the game, yet you must be aware of the times when the game situations differ from the theory. A tight chart-dependent player will be taken to the cleaners by less educated players, while a very inexperienced and unnumbers-savvy player will fall prey to more advanced players. The key is to find an equilibrium level. The winning player will be mathematically literate, yet have enough experience to judge when exceptions to the rule should be considered.
Many players eventually discover that theory only goes so far without real experience. Understanding probabilities is helpful, but the true challenge of poker lies in adapting to real opponents and evolving strategies.
The Bottom Line
Poker calculators and strategy tables can absolutely help players improve. They clarify the mathematical framework that underpins the game and reduce many of the mistakes beginners commonly make. However, the tools are not magic and poker is still a game that is based on the competition between human beings. So, although the training and preparation for the game could make it as objective as possible, the humans, even after the training, cannot avoid the mistakes and thus the weaker player can take advantage of their opponent’s irrational behavior.
The smart play is to view a calculator as an educational aid, not as a crutch for making decisions at the table. You should use the device to learn the odds, to work on particularly troublesome hands and to get a feel for EVs. Then shut it off and play. In most competitive games, including poker, the only way to truly learn is at the table.