While reviewing some hands in SNG Wizard I can across a HU hand where the Wizard recommendation was to shove any two against a villain with a 17% calling range. In this particular case I had 3c2c so I wondered what the equity was against this range.
I noticed that the hands included in the 17% range were quite a lot different when comparing Equilab/Pokerstove (they are the same) with SNG Wizard ranges.
My question is, which is correct or most accurate, best to use, does it even matter etc?
I think you've missed my point.
My question isn't about this particular hand I was just giving some background with that. What I am interested in is the difference between the two applications interpretation of the actual hands that comprise a 17% range as I had always assumed that this would be the same.
It isn't just for 17%, it seems to apply to all ranges apart from the extremes.
For example 30% range in Pokerstove is
55+, A2s+, K5s+, Q7s+, J8s+, T8s+, 98s, A7o+, A5o, K9o+, Q9o+, J9o+, T9o
Whereas 30% in SnG Wizard is
22+, A2s+, K4s+, Q9s+, JTs, A2o+, K8o+, QJo
Now I realize that the percentages are not exact as there are 6 more hands in the pokerstove example but this only represents about 0.5% difference and the difference in the actual hands not the number of them is considerable.
I posted the question on the Wizard forum and got the following responses from support:
For hero's hand range
The ranking order of hands is different.
The order of hands included in the hero’s hand range depends on the profitability of each hand. That order will change depending on the situation. For example, small suited connectors will usually rank higher when you are likely to have multiple opponents.
The other program most likely use a fixed hand ranking.
and for villains hand ranges
Opponent hand ranges use Sklansky-Karlson hand rankings, which was the default hand ranking used when the Wizard was first published. I will be adding a feature that will allow user to create custom hand rankings for opponent hand ranges in SW2.
Although this literally answers my question it doesn't explain which is better to use when calculating hand equity against a given range.
It seems that Pokerstove/Equilab is more conservative as, for example, TT has 59% equity against the 20% hand range using the Pokerstove top 20% of hand but 63% against the Wizard top 20% of hands. Erring on the side of caution I shall use Pokerstove for equity calculations and consider that marginal shoves in SitnGo Wizard could be folds.
Edit:
I've since found this http://www.pokerstove.com/pokerstove/faq.php#Q12 which says:
Q12. How does the PokerStove slider rank preflop hands?
The slider interface for setting the top N% of hands orders the hands according to their preflop all-in equity versus three random hands. This rather arbitrary selection was picked because it balances the value of high cards with the value of drawing cards. It is not an absolute ordering, and depending on the specific situation you may want to edit that range of hands when doing equity calculations.
