Basics
What is the Omaha (and Omaha Hi/Lo) Simulator?
The Omaha Simulators allow you to simulate all-in
situations between two or more omaha hands. They allow for simple simulations, where you know exactly what every player has, as well as complex simulations, where some players could have any one of a range of hands.
What are the results telling me?
The race results page tells you the pot-equity percentage
for each hand, as well as the number of wins and ties for each hand.
What do you mean by pot-equity percentage?
This represents the average amount of money a particular
hand wins from the pot, after taking ties into account.
I'm getting an "invalid race" error. What's going on?
For a race to be valid, it must have two or more hands. Also, make sure there are enough cards in the deck to satisfy your request. For example, in hold'em, you can't race aces against ace-king if there are two aces on the board.
What's the "Unroll" button for?
"Unroll" allows you to see the pre-flop, flop, turn, and river odds for a hand on one page. Simply enter all of the hands and the final board, and click the button.
What is the "Graph" button for?
Advanced
Can I use wild-cards and ranges when specifying the board?
Not at this time. If you specify any board cards, they must all be completely specified. For example, AsKdQh is ok, while AKQ is not.
What's the difference between "exhaustive" and "random"
race results?
An exhaustive simulation is one where every possible
combination of hands and boards is dealt, and the resulting answers are exact.
A random simulation is an approximation. In a typical random simulation, ProPokerTools performs 600,000 trials, which for most folks is more hands than they will see in years. With 600,000 trials, pot equity percentages will rarely be off by more than a few tenths (or hundredths) of a percentage point. In some cases, even 600,000 trials may take too long, in which case a smaller number of trials are run.
What does '10%' (or 'X%') mean when you are specifying a hand?
10% means the top 10% of all hands.
How is the ranking of all hands determined?
We used a computational method inspired by
an academic paper. The algorithm gradually refines a set of "good" hands, and in the process, an ordering is created. For more details on the algorithm, take a look at
this blog entry.
Is there a way I can look up the ranking of a hand?
Is there a place where I can download the complete ordering of hands?
Sure thing - here they are in plain-old text:
How is a set of the top N% of hands created?
When you request the top N% of all hands, we generate as close to N% hands without going over, just like in "The Price is Right" for you gameshow rerun addicts. Furthermore, we ensure that all equivalent hands are either all in or all out. (For example, in hold'em, there are 1326 possible hands. The top 1% of hands should be 13 hands using our price is right system. The top 13 hands would be six pairs of aces, six pairs of kings, and one pair of queens, but we remove the one pair of queens to conform to our "equivalent hands are either all in or all out" rule. Our result? 1% in hold'em means aces or kings).
Misc
I've noticed that I get many more exhaustive simulation results in hold'em than in omaha. Is your omaha code slower than your hold'em code?
The exhaustive simulation code for both omaha and hold'em is very similar, however, in most cases it is simply not practical to do exhaustive search for omaha because of the large number of hands involved. Currently, the omaha simulator only does an exhaustive search for those races where the range of hands for each player is exactly one.