There will be times, when modeling complex shapes and objects, that you find yourself with some really unusually shaped polygons, be them Ngons, Quads, or Tri-edged, and you will want to make selection sets based on specific sub-object characteristics of the mesh. While Max offers a plethora of flexible sub-object selection tools in the Graphite Modeling ribbon; one of the most overlooked, and under-appreciated, may be the "Similar" button.

Time and time again, I watch, or read through, 3dsmax tutorials on Youtube, or in HTML format, and the instructor, while usually very skilled and adept at showing how to achieve certain geometric goals, fails to use the Similar tool when making selections at the sub-object level that would have been far easier to do if they had. I'm not sure if it's just an unwillingness of some old-school Max users to stray from using only the tools available in the Modify comman panel, or if they just don't realize there's an easier way to do the exact same operation, but in far FEWER steps.  Whatever the reason is, the Similar function often gets ignored.  It's a feature I fell in love with early on in my 3dsmax training, when I was doing a lot of abstract and procedural modeling, and rarely get through a modeling session without utilizing it for something, even now.

Anyway, I'll give you a quick overview of how this tool can be useful when working on an oddly-shaped, or tessellated mesh, and especially when you want to make
specific selections based on correlative topology.

Let's say you have a face on your mesh selected. It doesn't matter how many edges it has, or what shape it is. ANY FACE (you CAN select more than one face at a time too, however, and make similar selections based on them).  Now, navigate to the Graphite ribbon at the top of your screen, and find "Similar" in the Modify Selection panel dropdown.

Beneath the Similar button is another arrow. When you click the arrow, you get an additional flyout, with tickboxes for parameter filters. By default, all but one of these parameter filters is already checked. This will give you the greatest possibility of selecting faces that are very similar in all possible characteristics to your initial selection(s), except Normal direction, which is the most limiting parameter, so
would only rarely be useful.

Selecting combinations of these parameter filters will often provide the expected results, but sometimes you may need to "mix and match", or play with combinations, in order to get the selections you need. All in all, however, when you finally understand what each parameter does, and what combinations will provide the necessary selections, you are bound to save yourself a ton of time compared to manually selecting each face, or selecting loops or rings, then removing the unwanted parts.

I know some of you are thinking, well this is nowhere near as predictable as going to the Selection tab of the Graphite panel, and choosing the "By Numeric" option, where you can select polygons based on the number of sides. While this may be true in many cases, there are certainly going to be times where you wish to make selections of polygons that contain different edge characteristics in relationship to each other
overall, but may share a similar face area to the polygon you have already selected.  In other words, it's like saying, "I want all the polygons that are LIKE the one I have selected", even if they have a different number of sides.  Or, when you want polygons of the SAME number of sides, but only sharing the same shape characteristics of the one you have selected, like in my pictures above!  I wanted only the triangles that matched, or were similar to, the one I chose, based on the parameter filters I ticked.

So if this tool isn't already part of your routine workflow, trust me; once you get the hang of using this function, you will find 101 reasons to use it in your routine modeling protocol. I like using it, in particular, when working with Vornoi diagrams, or unusual topology tessellations, where the polygons are uneven, or oddly shaped. I can select one polygon to inset or bevel, for example, and then choose "Similar" to grab all the others that are very much like it, but may not be the same edge count.

Good luck, and even if you're a 20 year veteran to 3D modeling, have some FUN with Max!

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