Introduction
When training preflop with PLO Trainer, you'll notice that there are two tabs on the right hand side - one for your range (which shows every single hand in the range), and one for categories (which organizes different hands and groups them together based on certain characteristics).
With the range view, you can see every hand at a glance and use the filter below to search for a specific hand or group of hands. This is useful if you want to lookup your specific hand, but what if you want to see other similar hands or a certain type of hand? For example, we know that a lot of double suited hands are opening from EP, but exactly which ones? This is where the categories function comes in.
Categories - What do the Percentages Mean?
When you first open the categories tab, you'll notice a bunch of different hand classes (such as unpaired double-suited, unpaired single-suited, unpaired rainbow, etc.) listed under the Full Range column. The percentage beside these headers is the total number of hands in our full range that make up this category.
For example, unpaired double-suited hands make up 23.77% of our entire range and unpaired single-suited hands make up 26.94% of our entire range.
Beside these labels, we can see a red and blue bar to the right hand side. Blue means fold, and red means pot. Inside these bars, we can see another percentage - these percentages are how many hands inside that range are doing something.
For example, in the unpaired double-suited category 75% of hands are folding and 25% of hands are raising to full pot.
Simplifying the numbers a little bit, roughly 24% of the time we'll have a hand from this category preflop and roughly 25% of these hands want to open from EP.
Categories - Drilling Deeper
When you click on a master category (or use the dropdown arrow), you'll see the category is expanded and broken down further into sub-categories.
For example, if we click on the "Unpaired Double-Suited" category we see the following categories show up:
Unpaired Double-Suited is now broken down into 5-Card Rundowns (0,1,2 gaps), 4-Card Rundowns (0,1,2 gaps), 3 Broadway, 2 Broadway + 3 Low, and Ragged. Remember, these percentages show how often we are doing something with all of our hands from this category, so our Unpaired Double-Suited 4-Card Rundowns category is opening 49% of the time from EP.
You can drill down even further as long as you see an arrow to get a better understanding of each category.
Please note with 5-Card PLO there are so many millions of hand combinations that there will often be some overlap with certain hands where they can fit into more than one category. We've tried to assign and categorize each hand as clearly as possible.
Categories - Training
Beside each category (and sub-category) if you drill down further has a checkbox beside each category name. If you click the checkbox and then click the "T" shaped icon above, it'll load that category/filter for you to train and study.
The icon looks like this:
Please note that the checkboxes only work on Desktop and are not optimized to show up on mobile or tablet yet. This feature will be available in the future.
Categories - Definitions
Unpaired Double-Suited (23.77% of entire range)
Hands in this category have no pair and are double suited. Hands in this category can feature:
Exactly two of a suit and one other suit (also called double suited pure, as both our suits are pure and don't feature 3 of a suit)
Exactly three of one suit and two of another suit (also called double triple suited, as one suit will have three of that suit)
Unpaired Single-Suited (26.94% of entire range)
Hands in this category have no pair and have one suit. Hands in this category can feature:
Exactly two of a suit and three cards of another suit (two hearts, one club, one diamond, one spade)
Exactly three of a suit and two cards of another suit (three hearts, one club, one diamond)
Exactly four of a suit and one card of another suit (four hearts, one club)
Exactly five of one suit, a monotone hand
One Pair Double-Suited (20.60% of entire range)
Hands in this category have one pair in hand and are double suited. Hands in this category can feature:
Exactly two of a suit and one other suit (also called double suited pure, as both our suits are pure and don't feature 3 of a suit)
Exactly three of one suit and two of another suit (also called double triple suited, as one suit will have three of that suit)
One Pair Single-Suited (23.79% of entire range)
Hands in this category have one pair in hand and have one suit. Hands in this category can feature:
Exactly two of a suit and three cards of another suit (two hearts, one club, one diamond, one spade)
Exactly three of a suit and two cards of another suit (three hearts, one club, one diamond)
Exactly four of a suit and one card of another suit (four hearts, one club)
Exactly five of one suit, a monotone hand
Two Pair Double-Suited (2.45% of entire range)
Hands in this category have two pairs in hand and are double suited. Hands in this category can feature:
Exactly two of a suit and one other suit (also called double suited pure, as both our suits are pure and don't feature 3 of a suit)
Exactly three of one suit and two of another suit (also called double triple suited, as one suit will have three of that suit)
Two Pair Single-Suited (2.45% of entire range)
Hands in this category have two pairs in hand and have one suit. Hands in this category can feature:
Exactly two of a suit and three cards of another suit (two hearts, one club, one diamond, one spade)
Exactly three of a suit and two cards of another suit (three hearts, one club, one diamond)
Exactly four of a suit and one card of another suit (four hearts, one club)
Exactly five of one suit, a monotone hand
With 5-Card PLO, it's not possible to have a rainbow hand as we're always going to have at least one suit combination in our hand.
When studying and training, it's important to focus on the categories that have the biggest impact on our winrate and the categories we see the most often. For example, we only see two pair (or double paired) hands about 1% of the time overall, but we are dealt an unpaired single-suited hand almost 52% (or half) of the time.