Pre-flop Matrix

Hi all,

I initially planned on playing limit holdem and was going to evantually "graduate" to NL. I only played limit for an incredibly brief time before realizing how different limit and NL were, but that's where I came from and that's where I started my holdem education.

More specifically, I took a lot of advice from www.kingscascade.com, mainly pre-flop. Mangatang has some pretty cool Excel tools too, and I do still use his session log. I wish I could use his pre-flop simulator and pre-flop matrix though, because they are cool little tools.

So right now I want to look at the Matrix. You can find the original here:

http://www.kingscascade.com/PokerWhatIf.html

I want to modify that for NL holdem, and I dug through Benson's post on pre-flop play to get a start at doing that. You can download my results here:

http://www.datafilehost.com/download-1ee88997.html

The problem is that I'm a noob, and I'm trying to make a tool for myself when I don't have the expertise needed to dump into it. So I've filled in what I could from Benson's very informative post (and you'll see an x at the bottom left of each screen that was driven by that post, the rest are the original creator's).

So what do you think of what I have so far? Even on the screens that were influenced by Benson's post I had to fill in some gaps. Do you think you could help me fill it all in?

P.S. I only worked on the loose full tables, I'd like to get everything filled in eventually though, and I'll be digging through the 6-max pre-flop sticky too for that.)

This is a good exercise, but to play no limit, you really need to develop a feel for your opponent's hand ranges. I don't know that you can do that with this sort of graph.

That said, if you want to complete it, take a look at renton's 169 hand strategy sticky in the beginner's forum, that should get you going.

Er. When I say "Benson" I really mean "Renton" ... haha, sorry.

... and yes, of course there is more to poker than a cookie cutter tool like this. I fully expected that to be the first response I got, and it probably should be the first response always, but I think there is great value in starting with a baseline and working from there.

right on, gl!