3rd Party Poker Software Probabilities

[getfunky]

I have tested a few of these online third party poker "helper" programs. Many of them have features that rank hands and display the strength of hands, from your pocket cards through the river. I was just curious at how they could calculate these probabilities.

-ST

[Shawsy]

Depending on the software, you can run simulations with given hands against all the possible boards.
For instance, heads up, if you want to compare two given hands, there are C(48,5) or 1,712,304 possible boards. Obviously computers can evaluate the number of times each hand wins/loses with each of these boards very quickly.