Poker Equity & OddsHow to count poker combos
Short answer
A pair has 6 combos, a suited hand 4 and an offsuit hand 12, out of 1,326 starting hands. Holding a card removes the combos that use it, so with an ace in your hand AK goes from 16 combos to 12. Poker Equity & Odds counts them on the range grid; these are counting facts, checked in the engine.
The three numbers
a pair
Four suits, two at a time.
a suited hand
One per suit.
an offsuit hand
Four suits for one card, three for the other.
6 + 4 + 12 = 22 is wrong, by the way: a pair and a suited hand are different ranks. The 1,326 total is 13 pairs x 6 plus 78 rank pairs x (4 + 12).
Remove your own cards
| You can see | AK suited | AK offsuit | AK in all |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nothing | 4 | 12 | 16 |
| An ace in your hand (A♥) | 3 | 9 | 12 |
| AK in your hand (A♥ K♦) | 2 | 7 | 9 |
Combos on a board
| Villain could hold | Combos left |
|---|---|
| AA | 3 |
| 99 | 3 |
| AK | 12 |
| AQ | 12 |
Three aces left. Three ways to pair them.
Value against bluffs
On the river the question is how many of villain's combos are value and how many are bluffs, and the answer is a count, not a feeling. Lesson 5.3 of the course, Count their bluffs, does one river with the grid open.
The grid counts for you
Paint a range and the grid shows the combos still live once your cards and the board are out. The weights behind every range number.
Questions
How many combos of AK are there?
16: 4 suited and 12 offsuit. Hold an ace yourself and it drops to 12; hold AK and villain has 9 left.
How many starting hands are there in Hold'em?
1,326 two-card combinations. Grouped by rank and suitedness they make the 169 squares of the range grid.
What is a blocker?
A card you hold that removes combos from villain's range. An ace in your hand takes AA from 6 combos to 3 and AK from 16 to 12.
Why count combos at all?
Because a range number is a weighted average, and the combos are the weights. Twelve combos of AK count twice as much as six combos of QQ.
Where the numbers come from. Every figure on this page comes from the app's own engine, the code that runs on your phone. Outs come from the Outs & Odds tool, hit chances are exact counts, and equities count every runout with no sampling. Engine build 18a5e00d. More worked numbers: flush draw odds and the pot odds cheat sheet.
