The baize rubs against your wrist. A small bead of sweat rolls down your forehead. You ease the corner of your two cards from the table to glimpse at what you've been dealt. "How much chance do I have of winning with this," you think. Well, if you had this neat visualization, you'd be all set.
Put together by software engineer Chris Beaumont, the grid can tell you the strength of the hand dealt to you in a game of Texas hold 'em, given any other hand held by an opponent. Based on counting about 1.3 trillion possible combinations of cards, the gird shows the win-loss percentage differences for all possible opponent hands. Each card value pairing is represented as a four by four grid to show each suit.
Over on Beaumont's site, you can enter in any hand that you're dealt, and it shows a grid—like the one above—of how strong any opponent hand is. This example assumes you're holding a four of hearts and a queen of spades; blue indicates you're likely to win, red that you're likely to lose.
Given that the results gathered from the 1.3 trillion possible combinations are quite complex, Beaumont has also put together other visualizations, too—like averaged hand strength, hand frequencies and more. If you're a real poker buff, it's well worth a read. Then maybe you can go try out your new-found knowledge. [Chris Beaumont via Flowing Data]