How to Use a Poker Equity Calculator
A poker equity calculator is a simple tool to help you understand when a move in poker is profitable. It’s not the bee all and end all, as you probably already know this is always the case with poker, as there are often other factors that come into play, but… it’s certainly wise to have a good baseline for your decisions. You will often hear pros talking about running hands through a poker equity tool, like equilab or flopzilla for certain spots.
Running hands and ranges is a really good exercise to do away from the table, and can give you a better understanding of what hands are profitable to play in different situations. It is worthwhile spending your time looking at equities as you will improve your poker game.
For our examples, we’re going to use a new tool called rockhopper because in our opinion it’s the easiest and fastest to use.
Who Won The Hand?
This simple example shows you who has the best chance of winning throughout the hand, by simply selecting 2 cards and the flop, river and turn.
In this example we will simplify things and we won’t consider implied odds and we will assume that they won’t bet on the turn. You can see on the flop that KK has a 27% chance of winning, so if the villain gives the correct pots odds, it is correct to call. For example if the pot is 75 chips and the villain bets 25. You need to call 25 to win 100, so this is 4:1 which is 20% as a percentage. Your equity is greater than the pot odds, so the maths would imply it’s correct to call. If they bet 50 into a pot of 100, that is odds of 2:1, so you need 33%, it’s probably a fold. We’re talking poker here, so it isn’t quite this cut and dry if you should fold or call, but does give us a good starting point for what to consider. (If you are struggling to work out pot odds there are many simple tools out there, like this one)
This can be useful in retrospect, when you have seen the hand at show down but we don’t always see the hands and this doesn’t always help our thought process when playing the hand. So what can we do? We can estimate what hand they are playing.
Hand Versus Range
Here we’re going to assume a very tight player. You know the type, they only 3-bet with AA,KK or AK (both suited and off suit). And we have QQ.
By clicking the range button we are shown a grid, with pairing diagonally from left to right, suited hands to the right of the pairs(indicated with a “s”) and off suit (indicated with an “o”). We highlight AA, KK, AKs and AKo. This shows that we have an equity of 39.8% with QQ, so we can use that number to help in our decision making. Try changing the board here and you can see which boards benefit you and which benefit the villain more. This is an exercise I’ve found really helpful in understanding different board textures.
Visualising Villains Range
When studying, I find just being able to see the hands that I think the villain has got to the river with helps a lot in my decision making. By using an equity calculator’s range grid, you can add and remove hands and even suits. Not all poker equity calculators allow you to specify certain suits, but rockhopper does, so we’ll stick with this tool. For example if the board looks like this:
We might assume, for example, that if they do have AK it will only be when of clubs or spades that have made it to the river and we can change this in the grid to help us visualise all the hands, and of course we can see how changing their range changes the chances of them having a winning hand.
Studying Away From the Table
If you listen to any accomplished player they will always talk about how they became successful by studying. Understanding how equities change and running previous hands through an equity calculator will certainly help you improve.
