I've been doing alot of work on combos recently and coming to terms with them for hand reading. But I was just wondering - is it possible to reverse engineer the combinations principle to evaluate flop texture, our holdings & potential actions.

I appreciate that mathematically speaking it is 100% possible (with ALOT more math) but what benefit could a player gain from it? More importantly could the benefit ever outweigh the effort involved if this was broken down into several numerous scenarios using Excel.

Someone pointed me recently to a book you might find interesting, called "Statistical Holdem" which has all kinds of interesting charts and probability stuff that I'd never heard of anywhere else.

I tried googling this book but couldn't find it. Do you know where I could get it?

Yeah I'm not seeing it either. I've never read the book, was just described to me yesterday by a friend. I think he has a copy so I'll see if I can find out. I believe it was published in the early to mid 90s.

I like your username, thats exactly what I thought when I read your post..

what?

Not u.

LOL
This probably makes me the least informed person to read this post, but.... What is a combo and how do you use then to help with hand reading?
Cheers

Yes, quite frankly this is what advanced poker math delves heavily into.

You can use game theory to find nash equilibrium strategies, so as to guide you on "near optimal" strategies according to your range.

ie: you may say that you have 200 combos in your range when you raise from MP, and that you plan on c-betting about 125 combos (depending on flop texture) if you have position post flop. Then you can continue to count combos, and guesstimate opponent's combos altogether (based on their equilibrium strategy, which assumes they are rational players). This will greatly enhance your hand reading skills (even though not all poker players are smart enough or rational enough to do what they should). And if you can combine it with integration into opponent's tendencies, then your reads are much more accurate.


Anyways, this is a lot of hard work. For you have to study game theory as it relates to poker (buy mathematics of poker).

Then you need a good program that does all the equity calculations, and tracks all the combinations (poker cruncher for iphone).

Then lastly, you just need some hands under your belt, so you can analyze them in your free time!

Let's say you've decided that someone has either AK or AA. There are no aces or kings exposed. There are 16 ways for someone to have AK, and 6 ways for them to have AA, if you haven't seen an A or K. That means they'll have AK 16/22 times and AA 6/22 times. This should help you figure out how often you're good.

In non-holdem games this is particularly important. Take stud high for example, when someone has a K door card and you have, say, a pair of Qs. They have 2 down cards, so to make a pair of Ks they need one K down and any other card. Since you've seen 10 cards on 3rd st, they'd need 1 K of 3 and any of 41 other cards so there are 123 ways for them to have KK. For each other pair, there are 6 ways to have it down if there are no dead cards for that pair, 3 ways if there is 1 dead card and 1 way if there are 2 dead cards. So on average probably 3-ish, so there would be 33-66 ways for them to have a pair less than KK. If you were pretty sure they had a pair, then their range is extremely dominated by KK, somewhere between 4:1 and 2:1 in favor of them having KK. Being able to estimate these possibilities is a key element in playing stud, people who can't do it will never be expert players.

Thank you..I learned something new today. I have a lot of studying to do. Is there a good place (book) to learn more about this?

The general field that you use for this and many other poker problems is called "combinatorics" and is usually contained in places like statsistics classes or I learned about it as part of "discrete math" in college. It's basically pretty simple, I'm not sure where to start but wikipedia is probably as good of a place as any. Many many poker and gambling problems boil down to questions quite similar to "if you have 4 pairs of pants and 5 shirts, how many distinct outfits can you wear" or "if you draw 2 marbles without replacement from a jar containing 5 each of colors, how many 2-marble-combos are there" and such things. Discrete math covers this kind of stuff in less than a week typically so I think it's pretty easily learnable.