Methodology

How every number on this site is produced

Most poker reference pages publish a number and no method. This page exists so you can check ours. If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix the product or the page.

Where the strategies come from

Every strategy in the solver is decoded from MonkerSolver's own solution files, using Monker's exact compact-row hand indexing. Nothing is rebuilt from equity buckets and nothing is interpolated between boards. Where a solve stores a mixed strategy, frequencies come through at half-percent resolution: if the solver bet a hand 62.5% of the time, the tool says 62.5. Where a solve stores a pure strategy instead, you get that unsmoothed, and the mixing you see across a hand class is the honest blend of its combos rather than a smoothed average.

The PLO library is nine solves: 6-max from 12 to 200 big blinds, plus heads-up at 100, each solved preflop through river. The NLHE library is eight 6-max solves from 20 to 200 big blinds. Rake is stated next to the stack selector on every depth, because ranges move with rake and a range quoted without its rake assumption is not a fact.

Exact where possible, simulated where not

Postflop equity is exact enumeration - every runout counted, not sampled. Preflop equity is exact where the combination count allows and Monte Carlo where it does not, and every page that uses a simulated figure states the trial count and the standard error that follows from it.

This is why some tables report a tier rather than a rank. The PLO5 rankings run 200,000 trials per class, which gives roughly 0.11 percentage points of standard error. The top 142 classes sit inside a 0.5-point band. Numbering them 1 to 142 would be presenting noise as precision, so the page reports the band and says why.

The combinatorics we publish

Counting arguments are stated in full rather than asserted, because they are the numbers most often repeated wrongly. PLO4 has 16,432 canonical starting-hand classes over 270,725 combinations - the figure is frequently miscited as 16,384, which is 214 and not the answer to any question about poker. Flop texture frequencies are enumerated across all 22,100 distinct flops rather than sampled.

Dates and drift

Every dataset page carries the date its underlying tables were generated, and that date is what the page's structured data reports as its publication date. When a solve is regenerated the derived pages are regenerated with it. A page that has not been recomputed does not get a fresh date just because it was edited.

What is reproducible, and what is not

Equity against a random hand is reproducible by anyone with a correct hand evaluator and enough compute. That is exactly why those datasets are published as CSVs under CC BY 4.0 - the claim is checkable, so giving it away costs nothing and lets anyone verify us. The solver strategies are a different matter: reproducing them needs a MonkerSolver licence, the same trees and the same rake model, so we describe the inputs precisely instead of pretending the output is trivially checkable.

Stated limits

The solver library covers 4-card PLO and 6-max NLHE cash. It does not cover PLO5 or PLO6, does not solve multiway postflop, has no heads-up NLHE, no ICM, no nodelocking and no custom sims. The equity calculators, the reference tables and the hand tracker do cover PLO5, PLO6, Big O, Omaha hi-lo and Short Deck. Where a tool cannot answer something honestly it says so rather than guessing: the hand tracker's leak reports, for example, refuse to issue a solver verdict for any spot with no matching solve, and gate every verdict behind a one-sided Wilson bound so a small sample cannot trigger one.

Corrections

If a number here is wrong, tell us and we will correct it and say what changed. We would rather publish a correction than carry a figure we cannot defend.

Questions

Which solver produced the strategies?
MonkerSolver. Every strategy in the tool is decoded from MonkerSolver's own solution files using its compact-row hand indexing. We do not rebuild strategies from equity buckets and we do not interpolate between boards.
Are the equity numbers simulated or exact?
Postflop equity is exact enumeration. Preflop is exact where the combination count allows it and Monte Carlo otherwise, with the trial count and the resulting standard error stated on the page that uses it.
Why do some pages report tiers instead of ranks?
Because the simulation cannot separate the classes. Where the standard error at the stated trial count is larger than the gap between two classes, ranking them 1 and 2 would be noise presented as precision, so the page reports a tier.
Can I check these numbers myself?
The equity figures, yes. Equity against a random hand is reproducible by anyone with a correct evaluator and enough compute, which is why those datasets are published as CSVs under CC BY 4.0. The solver strategies are not reproducible without a MonkerSolver licence and the same trees.
What are the known limits?
The solver library is 4-card PLO and 6-max NLHE cash only. No PLO5 or PLO6 solves, no multiway postflop, no heads-up NLHE, no ICM, no nodelocking, no custom sims. The calculators and the hand tracker do cover PLO5, PLO6, Big O, hi-lo and Short Deck.