Don’t be afraid to put money into the pot when you feel that you have the best of it. So even though we are increasing the amount of money we can lose by putting more money into a pot where we could be outdrawn, we are also increasing the amount of money we can win.īy putting more money in the pot with the best hand at this point (even though there is the chance that we may still lose), we will be winning more money in the long run.
POKER EQUITY CALCULATOR FOR ANDROID FULL
It may be the case that the river brings another J or T giving our opponent the better hand with a full house, but this fact is irrelevant on the turn when we have 91% equity. If you have more than 50% equity in the hand, you want to get as much money in the pot as possible. Therefore it stands to reason that we should try to get as much money into the pot as possible, and thus we are betting for value and trying to maximize the amount of money we will be winning from the hand. This means that for every extra dollar that we can get into the pot, we will be winning 91 cents of it. Betting for value because of pot equity.įor example, on the turn in the last example where we held A K against our opponents J T on a board of J T 2 Q, we had the nut straight and equity of 91%. When you have the best hand at the table, you are betting for value when you have the majority of the equity in the hand. However, the principle of equity and the equity you have in each pot at each stage in the hand explains why you should bet your hands when you think that you have the best of it. The answer is that you will rarely know what your opponent is exactly holding, and so it is not really possible to work out your equity whilst at the table and use it to your advantage.
It’s good to know what our chances of winning are and how much equity we have, but how should we incorporate this sort of information into our game?
POKER EQUITY CALCULATOR FOR ANDROID FREE
The likelihood of a hand winning in a certain situation is the same as the equity the hand has.Ī great example of a free (and very useful) equity calculator is PokerStove. So when you put the particular hand combinations into an odds calculator, the calculator runs out the rest of the hand thousands of times and notes down how many times each hand wins to give an accurate figure on the likelihood of the hand holding up. These percentage figures come from repeated computer simulations of the particular situations to help find an accurate estimate of each hand’s chances of winning. Where do these pot equity percentages come from? The odds calculator now tells us that we have a 91% chance of winning, whereas our opponent only has 9% chance of winning as they have to catch a J or a T to make a full house and win the pot. If we run our hands through an odds calculator once more, it shows that we now have a 22% chance of winning, which gives us a 22% equity of the amount that is currently in the pot.įurthermore, if the turn comes the Q giving us a straight, the odds of us winning the hand by the river will dramatically increase, and thus our equity will change once more. If the flop comes J T 2, our equity will change dramatically as we no longer have the hand that is most likely to win the pot.
This equity will not stay the same throughout the hand, because as more cards are dealt the strength and potential of each hand will change, and thus each player’s equity will change with it. Therefore our current pot equity is 65% of $30, or put more simply, $19.5. If we run these hands through an odds calculator it tells us that we have a 65% chance of winning the hand, assuming that all the cards are dealt out and neither player folds. Say for example we hold A K preflop and we know for a fact that our opponent holds J T, and there is $30 in the pot. So if there is 60% chance that you are going to win, you have 60% equity in the hand. Your equity is basically the amount of the pot that "belongs" to you based on the odds you have to win at a particular point in the hand. Pot equity (or just "Poker equity") is a mathematical application to poker that helps to explain why you should bet or check in certain situations. Equity percentages in this article have been calculated using the handy (and free) PokerStove.