About

Hold’em Sidekick gives you the information you need in a clear and concise way

Hold’em Sidekick is designed for use with online poker rooms and makes the calculations that all the pro poker players do. It not only tells you the current strength of your hand, but actually projects forward and tells you how strong your cards will be as the hand plays out.

Hold’em Sidekick can help you manage your bank roll and play winning poker! Sidekick is available for an incredibly low price of $14.50, less than a 3rd of the cost of some other odds calculators on the market.

How It Works

When you enter your cards into Sidekick and click ‘Calculate’ many different things happen. Every possible hand is calculated (using the dealt community cards) and the ranking of your hand is determined, a list of possible opponent hands that beat you is created, the number of outs you have is also calculated, along with the odds of hitting these outs and the approximate strength of them.

Finally the actual strength of your current hand is calculated. This percentage value is not merely the current ranking of your hand, which is what a lot of odds calculation programs give you, it is actually the chances of you winning the pot if all cards are dealt. In order to establish the true strength of your hand Sidekick will take into account the number of players and then play the hand over and over again, so giving you a true figure of how strong your cards are against the number of players still in the hand.

All this takes place in a few seconds (dependent on the speed of your computer and the amount of RAM you have available).

An Example Hand Using Sidekick

There are currently 2 players in the hand (us and one other tight player), the flop has just been dealt and we hold AH 8H with flop cards of 2H 7S JH. Hold’em Sidekick tells us that we have around a 68% chance of winning the hand, so the outlook is good.

However, with $80 in the pot our opponent raises with a bet of $20. We only have Ace high and given the tight nature of our opponent we get the feeling that they have a high pair or even three of a kind.

What should we do?

Given that we believe our opponent is strong many would simple fold in this situation. However, there are other options… Let’s take a look at Hold’em Sidekick’s stats tab.

Main Interface
Looking at our hand statistics we can see that our hand ranking (the position of our hand in a list of all possible ones) is 55% and the hand strength is 68%. Not bad, but as mentioned above we feel our tight opponent has a strong hand. Also, looking at the list of possible opponent hands we see that there are a lot out there that beat our ace high.
Stats Interface
Looking at the last section on the Sidekick stats window we see that we have one possible out. We are on a flush draw with a 19% chance (4.1:1) of making it. Also Sidekick tells us that if we make our flush we will have an approximate hand strength of 92%.

Given that we have put our opponent on a pair or trips, a flush would win us the hand. And as we hold the ace of hearts, we would definitely have the best flush out there.

So should we call that $20 raise?

In order to decide we need to look at our pot odds and Sidekick contains a pot odds calculator to help you.

Our opponent has just bet $20 into an $80 pot, so the pot now stands at $100. Entering these values into the calculator shows us we have pot odds of 5:1 (17%).
So yes, we should make this call as our pot odds (5:1) are greater than our card odds (4.1:1) and our percentage chance of making our hand (19%) is greater than the percentage of the pot we have to put in to call (17%).

For an in depth explanation of pot and hand odds take a look at these links:

Pot Odds Calculator
http://www.poker.com/articles/pot-odds.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pot_odds

http://www.thepokerbank.com/pot-odds.html