Glossary

PLO glossary

The terms our articles use, defined once.

Hand class: Hands that are the same once you ignore which suit is which. A♠A♥K♠Q♥ and A♦A♣K♦Q♣ are one class: they play identically. PLO4 has 16,432 classes, PLO5 134,459 and PLO6 962,988. Rankings rank classes.
Percentile (“Top X%”): A class’s rank divided by the number of classes in its game. “Top 6%” means about 6% of that game’s classes rank at or above it. It only compares hands of the same game, and every class counts once, however many concrete hands it stands for.
Playability ranking: Orders hands by how they do against opponents who keep playing only with playable hands: rank everything, keep the stronger hands, re-rank, and repeat until the order stops changing. Our articles use the 6-max version, the same table size in PLO4, PLO5 and PLO6. How we built it.
vs random ranking: Orders hands by raw equity against one random hand. A second view of hand strength, next to playability.
Suited, double-suited, triple-suited: In Omaha you play exactly two cards from your hand, so a flush needs two cards of one suit in your hand. Each such pair is a suited pair. A PLO6 hand can hold up to three.
Broadway cards: Ten, Jack, Queen and King (the Ace is counted apart in our articles).
Gap (in a hand): A rank missing inside your hand, between its highest and lowest card. K‑Q‑J‑10‑9‑8 has no gaps; K‑Q‑J‑9‑8‑7 has one (the 10 is missing). When an Ace plays as a low card (A‑2‑3‑4...), our articles treat the hand separately.
Range: The set of hands a player can hold in a spot. “Top 45%” is the best 45% of hand classes by our ranking; “the 8–40% band” skips the top 8% (which would re-raise instead) and keeps the next ones down to 40%.
Open (raise first in): The first voluntary raise of the hand, when everyone before you has folded. An opening range is the set of hands a player opens from a given seat.
Equity: The share of the pot a hand wins on average if all the cards are dealt out, ties split.
Equity distribution (the curve): On one flop, every hand in a range sorted from strongest to weakest, each drawn at its equity against the other range. The left end is the range’s best hands; the shape of the curve shows how many strong, medium and weak hands the range holds there.
Nuts, nut line: The nuts is the best possible hand on the board. In our curves the nut line is a fixed equity level (75%): the share of a range above it is its nutted part.
Bomb pot: Every player antes and everyone sees the flop, with no pre-flop betting — so each player holds a random hand.
AA: In our articles, a hand with at least two Aces, unless the text says exactly two.
Exact vs simulated: Exact numbers are counted over every possible hand or deal. Simulated numbers are estimates from a large number of random deals, and each article says which is which.