Q&A #18: Sklansky-Chubukov Numbers
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Bill asks,
Finished reading your No Limit Hold’em … reading it a second time and working on these tables. Might be asking the wrong half of the team but what gives with the odds of winning for the big pairs? I’ve been entering the numbers into a spreadsheet to resort them by winning percentage and I don’t quite understand the anomaly that gives a KK a lower winning percentage than say a 66. Assume it has to do with the chances lower ranked hands have of filling straights and flushes but just wanted to confirm.
Also … the tables were set-up for heads up situations from the blinds. Is it safe to extrapolate the numbers for early and middle positions? For example … if I took Q8s from the cut-off seat and then assumed the number of possible callers would I simply divide by the potential callers to arrive at a value? Know this oversimplifies the analysis but ties to a hand I was in the other night at a low limit no hold game where I was short stacked and would have won the pot if I had called a big preflop raise that ended up with 4 people all in preflop. Not really a question of hindsight but more of using these tables to effectively look at true odds, especially with the addtion of robust hands versus vulnerable. If I am reading this section of the book correctly it seems it makes sense to play many more hands more aggressively than most (the vast majority) of other authers advise from early and middle positions, even to what are considered to be big raises pre-flop. In this 1/2 NL game a typical pre-flop raise was 6-10 times the BB and a big raise was $40 to $70. So it wasn’t really playing like a $1/2 but again, seems like it would make sense to see many more hands than “normal”.
Great book by the way … it’s going to getting very dog eared I think…
Hey Bill. Thanks for the positive comments about No Limit Hold ‘em: Theory and Practice (which can be purchased through the Books & DVDs link in the main menu 
). The Sklansky-Chubukov numbers are one of the most interesting features of the book. But they can be a little tricky to interpret sometimes.
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Tags: david-sklansky, nlhtap, no-limit-holdem, no-limit-holdem-theory-and-practice, poker, preflop-play, s-c-numbers, sklansky-chubukov, sklansky-chubukov-numbers
Hi Ed,
I have a friend who is obsessed with heads up play at very beatable levels ($10 buy-in). Is it safe to recommend S-C rankings to him in this particular game (heads up). And is it OK play to apply S-C numbers early in the game when stacks are still large compared to the blinds?
Thanks and keep up the good work!
Kevin