When learning to play poker, a useful tool to have at your disposal is a poker odds calculator. Such poker odds calculators allow you to calculate the odds a given hand will be the best hand by the river. Many poker decisions are based in part on your win percentages and the utilization of such a tool lets you hone you sense of the odds while away from the game until you get to a point where you become quite skilled at recognising the strength of a hand.

A helpful feature of some poker odds calculators is the power to calculate percentages against a competitor with a hand range. Many people simply calculate the win percentages of a hand after the event when they knew what their opponent held to discover how bad a bad beat may have been. You can develop your game a lot more if you utilise this ability to calculate odds against a range of possible hands your opponent may hold.

As a poker player becomes more skilled, a lot of the game is about placing your opponent on a range of possible hands by analysing their present actions in relation to what you know about their game-play generally. For example, if a tight pre-flop player puts in a pre-flop raise, this can already begin to indicate that the player most likely holds one of a limited set of premium pre-flop hands. If you want to determine the value of a decision to call or potentially re-raise this player, it is not so important to know your odds against the hand they really have, which you will know after the event, but is better to take a look at your odds against the range of likely hands that your opponent would put in this pre-flop raise with.

As the hand progresses, further actions that your opponent makes on the flop, the turn and the river will permit a good player to further hone the range of possible hands their competitor may have, or potentially, revise what they thought their opponent to hold to a different hand range. A good poker odds calculator should then allow you to update an opponents hand range after the flop, turn or river, along with the board cards to evaluate the odds at every stage of the hand against your opponents likely hands. Such calculations can be terribly complicated without the use of a dedicated calculator for this, however a good poker odds calculator will permit these calculations to be performed by simply imputing the cards and hand ranges.

This capability to accurately place a player on a variety of hands is the key component to the high level of talent of many good poker players and can often be the deciding factor as to whether a poker player is a profitable player or not. It is important as you develop this skill to revise your understanding of poker odds to understanding the odds in relation to the range of hands your opponent may have.