Poker Software and Analysis

Texas Calculatem is an excellent tool, but in order to use Texas Calculatem most effectively, we must configure it to best match our play style.

Each player will have their own style. And while the default settings tend to work, I prefer to tighten things up a little, as the defaults can be a little too loose-passive for my tastes.

Settings

Calculation Speed can be set to Accurate (for fast CPUs) and Watch fold depth (takes extra time). These give the most reliable results and do not appear to have a significant impact on performance. Even when playing on multiple tables, calculations take no more than one second, and I only have a £300 dell laptop.

The check boxes in between Calculation Speed and Odds display are superficial and down to personal preference.

For Odds Display, I use Ratio (3:1). This makes it easiest to compare the odds against the pot odds. I use Poker Office 5 for table selection, and to overlay pot odds onto online Poker tables. Unfortunately Texas Calculatem 7.0 does not display pot odds. Hopefully this feature will be added in the future.

Post-flop advice and Pre-fop advice bars are both set to about a quarter of the way between tight and loose. They are on the side closer to tight.

Rank pocket hands by their historical strength on the river. Afterall, we are aiming to have the best hand on the river, not the flop.

Set minimum playable hands, by position, is checked. I have tightened it up to only play hands hands that are worth raising against the remaining field, assuming that there are 10 players with random hands.

• Small Blind - 50% (default 40%). If there is no one left apart from from the dealer, then if your hand beats over 50% of hands, you'll be ahead more often then you're not.
• Big Blind (raised) - 92%. This is the default setting.
• Just left or big blind (4+ p) - 90% (default 85%). From the first position after the big blind (Under The Gun), we need to beat 9 out of 10 players if there are 10 players at the table.
• Dealer Button - 67% (default 50%). If we need to beat the small and big blinds, then we need to beat two thirds of random hands, in order to be ahead most of the time.
• Other Position (5+ p) - 83% (default 70%). We need to beat 5/6 players to make a raise worth while from here.

These settings, assuming that we aren't squeezed out by pre-flop raises, should result in a VPIP of about 18%.