Laying The Foundation For A Conditional Spreadsheet

In this spreadsheet we will need to approximate a typical set of hand ranges that each person folds if folded to. We are only interested in the hand strengths given multiple folds, and we will not worry about a raise since that just represents a particular hand strength and fodls after that may not mean as much. While someone might open the pot with A3s they probably will not call a raise with it and probably will even fold ace jack so the fact that people fold after a raise isn't very actionable data to me.

On the other hand, every fold with no one forcing the action before they have acted has to be taken as information, even if the assumption is slightly inaccurate, it is more accurate than assuming they fold at random.

As such, I want to estimate a tight/solid gameplan where the players only open when they are likely to have the best hand. the formula will be 1/# of players in the pot. Although technically we could have the raiser simply match the opponent's range, we will instead include the player. That means with 9 players total, first to act will open with 1/9=11.11% of hands. With 8 they open with the top 1/8 hands and so on. Unfortunately hand strength is somewhat subjective or at least not easily ascertainable. In other words, some hands are strong if the action ends at the flop, other hands are strong to the river. Some hands are strong in multiway action, others are much stronger heads up. Some hands are strong given a certain hand range folds, others are weaker given those same hand ranges folding.

But any assumption is better than "random folds".
So rather than get into a complex strategy of occasionally playing a particular hand and having a certain probability of playing each particular card, I will keep it simple.
I will use the hands ranged by EV according to actual games.

http://www.tightpoker.com/poker_hands.html

Here is a "solid tight preflop strategy" based upon the above. Note that it is perfectly okay to have a range that includes losing hands as it better disguises your other hands and ultimately you have a range of "lower end" hands that are "break even" which should improve the action you get with better hands and make your style less easy to exploit. Additionally, the results of the hands in the chart via the aforementioned link does not say why some of those hands are losing. Some of them are because amateurs play them wrong and lose a lot, skewing the average. Of course the experts could also skew some of the worst hands positively as well. Nevertheless, I doubt when this study was done people paid attention to game theory and position as well as they should. With that being said we have the following strategy.

Top 1/9 hands: 77+, AJ+, KQ, A8s+, K9s+, QTs+, JTs
Top 1/8 hands: 77+, AT+, KQ, A7s+, A5s, K9s+, QTs+, JTs
Top 1/7 hands: 66+, AT+, KJ+, A7s+, A5s, A4s, K9s+, Q9s+, J9s+, T9s
Top 1/6 hands: 55+, AT+, KT+, QJ, A3s+, K9s+, Q9s+, J9s+, T9s
Top 1/5 hands: 55+, AT+, KT+, QJ, A2s+, K7s+, Q9s+, J9s+, T8s+, 98s
Top 1/4 hands: 44+, A9+, KT+, QT+, JT, A2s+, K4s+, Q7s+, J8s+, T7s+, 97s+, 87s, 76s
Top 1/3 hands: 33+, A8+, K9+, Q9+, J9+, T9, A2s+, K3s+, Q6s+, J7s+, T7s+, 97s+, 86s+, 75s+, 64s+, 54s
Top 1/2 hands: 22+, A7+, K7+, Q8+, J8+, T6+, 97+, 86+, 75+, A2s+, K2s+, Q3s+, J4s+, T6s+, 96s+, 86s+, 74s+, 63s+, 53s, 43s

This strategy will lay the foundation for determining the probability of each card being left in the deck and as a result it can allow more accurate understanding of what opponent is likely to have... and thus, using a monte carlos simulation using poker software come up with a weighted average of how the hand range fares vs an average hand.