About

Why Edge.Poker?

We are going to cover 2 different whys in this section. The first is about why we built this app and the second is why you should care.

Stockenja is a startup that focus on building technologies and products to help traders and investors to make better decisions. Due to increased cost and technical challenges, we decided to look at other fields to see if we can apply some of our knowledge learnt in trading to other fields. It turns out that stock trading is one form of gambling. In the domain of gambling, poker is probably the most well known.

We decided to look into poker (Texas Hold'em) to see if we can apply what we learnt in the stock market to poker. Also, we were curious to see if poker can teach us anything about the stock market.

Due to our previous experience, we figured that developing a poker analyzer would satisfy our goal. This experience has proven to be relatively fruitful and we have already achieved some of our goals. We were able to quickly figure out how to use Kelly criterion in poker and build out a Texas Hold'Em simulator. We believe that the Texas Hold'Em simulator will be an increasingly valuable technology as time progresses.

So, why should you care?

Most strategies and sophisticated poker odds calculators or poker analyzer rely on the concept of guessing opponents' hands. Mathematically speaking, guessing opponents' hands relies heavily on individual's skill and it is heavily biased. Bias causes highly volatile performance, if not losing a lot of money. Furthermore, it is impossible to mathematically prove that a strategy is profitable in the long term. We believe that using our free online calculator/analyzer for extended period of time will train and coach you to be a better player.

Due to our mathematical approach of estimating probability, the advice given is mathematically guaranteed to produce maximum profitability in the long run. Please note that you may still lose money in some games. But, in the long run, you should be profitable.

Other than that, we offer top opponents' hands analysis given the shared cards. Our post-flop opponents' hands analysis can quickly train you to identify what are some of the dangerous opponent hands. This is very helpful when you are new to the game.

What is Edge.Poker?

Edge.Poker is a poker odds calculator and analyzer. Our tool provides:

1. Your winning odds based on only known cards.Currently, Edge.Poker always assumes no players fold. The reason we made this choice is because of its simplicity and it represents the worst case scenario. This means that, when Edge.Poker tells you that you have 60% chance of winning, your actual chance/odds could be 65% because people fold when they receive bad cards. Folding behaviors will be included in future version of Edge.Poker. The winning odds is estimated by running Monte Carlo simulation.
2. Opponents' average win rate. This is calculated as: (1 - My Win Rate)/(Num of Players - 1)
3. Hand Percentile. The hand percentile is the percentile based on the hand's winning odds. Double aces would have the highest odds of winning and therefore it is on the top 1 percent. The stronger the hand, the higher the rank of percentile.
4. Top hands that you could lose to after flop. This feature helps you to understand the risk and also to exercise judgement on whether your opponents have those hands. This feature also help beginners to reduce bias when having good hands because you will be trained to always identify the cards that can beat yours.
5. Recommended action. The recommended action is based on your probability of winning.
6. Optimal Bet Size. Optimal Bet Size is based on: (1) the number of opponents that are still in the game, and (2) the odds of winning. The number of opponents that are still in the game is related to the pot odds. You can view it as the reward-to-risk ratio:
   
   Pot Odds >= One round reward-to-risk ratio (==number of opponents still playing)
   
   We chose not to use pot odds because it is hard to calculate in real life. But, the number of opponents who are still playing is something everyone can grasp immediately. Using the above formula, we know that the actual pot odds is always greater than the number of opponents still playing. Hence, the number of opponents still playing is somewhat like a lower limit for the pot odds, which is easy to figure out.
   
   So, depending on how many opponents are still in the game, you can quickly determine the (approximated) optimal bet size.
   
   Using the winning odds and the reward-to-risk ratio, we use the Kelly criterion to compute the optimal bet size.
7. Designed to be used real-time while playing online poker. To make it usable in real-life game, we ensured that Edge.Poker is responsive and we tried hard to reduce the number of interactions to compute the final result.

When to use Edge.Poker?

Edge.Poker is best used during online poker cash game.

You can also use it for tournament as well. However, tournament is heavily dependent on how good your luck is during the early phases. The more chips you rack up earlier, the more helpful Edge.Poker will be.

We believe that consistently using Edge.Poker in every online game will help improve your performance the most.

If you have not read our "How-to-Use" page, we highly suggest you to read it here.