After watching several youtube videos regarding combos and still not getting it. What combinations of combos of villain ranges are there and why is it necessary to know this?

Can anyone explain the whole thing and process?

Some hand examples and putting them in action would really help.

Combos is short for combinations. It refers to how many ways there are of making each hand, based on the suits.
For a pocket pair, there are 6 combos.
For a suited hand, there are just 4 combos. (There are only 4 suits, so AKs comes in hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades).
Offsuit hands (e.g. AKo) have 12 combos.

Post-flop, combo-counting gets a bit more tricky, because the cards on the board reduce how many combos are left behind.

But as a quick example, on a K72 board, there are 9 combos of AKo and 3 combos of AKs (12 total combos of AKo/AKs), and three possible combos of each set (KK, 77, 22).

If you download Equilab, you can see the full range of hands (169 groups of hands, 1326 total combos) and there's a box to tick that highlights precisely how many combos of each hand are possible on specific boards.

It's useful to know how many combos of hands are either beating you or losing to you, since it tells you how often you are likely ahead of behind.
E.g. If you have AK on K72, you're rarely losing, because there's only 6 combos of AA beating you, one combo of KK, and 6 combos of 77 and 22. Two pairs made by K7, K2 or 72 can often be ruled out, since those hands are hardly ever played in normal circumstances, so in that spot you can be pretty sure that only 13 combos are beating you. Since a villain's range often contains 200+ combos on the flop, you can feel very happy with AK on K72 if only 13 are beating you... until you start getting some heat.

Thats a good explanation Arty. Im also just starting to get into combos. It seems overwhelming but so did pot odds 5 years ago. I have equilab so im probably gonna start messing around with it but im not really sure the best way to learn.

I can't seem to figure out how to calculate this. (formula)

It's not so much a formula as just the amount of combinations that are left to have an AKo on this flop.

In this case, if the flop is Ad7c2s, the combinations possible:

AcKd
AcKs
AcKh
AsKd
AsKc
AsKd
AcKs
AcKd
AcKh

There really isn't one formula that decides how many combinations are left, it's just running it in an equity calculator like equilabs.

K on the board, so 3 kings unaccounted for. 4 aces are unaccounted for.
Multiply kings by aces to get the total number of AKo/AKs combos.
3x4 = 12
3 of those must be suited, because the K on the flop removes one of the 4 AKs that are possible pre. So if there's 12 of AKo/AKs, including 3 of AKs, there must be 12-3 = 9 of AKo

If you think that's tricky, wait till you try counting two pair combos if villain only plays suited varieties of some hands.
e.g. Tc 9c 5s allows 3 combos of T9s (spades, diamonds, hearts), but Tc 9s 5c only allows 2 combos of T9s (diamonds and hearts).

I didn't know you could have a different image under your username in posts and in your profile, but apparently you can.

Also, both of yours are great. And every time I see your posts, I start kinda wanting to watch Back to the Future. You are eventually going to end up wasting a lot of my time (enjoyable time wasting though). As an example, I now want to watch Back to the Future (or I could go with 2; not really feeling 3 right now). I don't know if I actually can now though; it is a little late.


For ****s sake .... I had live TV of Family Guy paused and I just ran out of pause time and it started playing and it was a Back to the Future homage with the skateboard/hoverboard chase into the manure truck. Really just happened.