1. How To Calculate Equity Percentage
2. Equity In Poker How To Calculate Present Value

Getting Started. Background Information. Calculating your pot odds and equity in a hand in poker. Check out for more poker tips, strategy articles and videos, and news. In this tutorial, we discuss how to calculate your pot equity. Equity in poker is the share of the pot that is yours based on the odds that you will win the pot at that point in play. Equity changes after each street – pre-flop, flop, turn and river.

Table Of Contents

If you are looking for an article to finally understand the concept of poker equity, this is the right one for you.

In this beginner's guide to poker equity, we cover:

• what is equity in poker and why it matters
• how to calculate the equity in poker
• and a lot more.

There's also a list of the best poker equity calculators, so you can sit back and let someone else do the math for you.

Continue reading to understand why you need to master the concept of equity in poker and how you can use the best poker equity calculators to your advantage when you play online.

What is Equity in Poker?

The concept of 'poker equity' is one beginners don't like and often struggle to understand.

Not many love to think they should base their decisions on numbers or rely on a math-based approach when they play cards. After all, that's not what they expected when they first entered the world of poker.

If you are one of them, I have bad news for you:

Unless you understand what equity is in poker (and how to use it to your advantage), your results will hardly get your name featured on our articles here on PokerNews.

When you play poker, 'Equity' refers to your 'rightful' share of a pot as determined by your current chance of winning the hand.

If you are heads-up with $180 in the pot and your chance of winning the hand is 50%, your 'equity' in the hand at that moment is $90.

Be careful, though. The figure:

• does not refer to what you expect to win on that particular hand;
• it relates to the amount you would expect to win on average over multiple instances of the same situation.

If you think about this, you might understand why many players prefer to refer to poker equity as a synonym of 'value.'

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How to Calculate Equity in Poker

With so many poker equity calculators out there, you might ask: 'why should I learn how to calculate the equity in poker?'

A quick tap on your mobile phone or tools like this poker odds calculator can do the math for you. In seconds.

They tell you the value, the odds, and the optimal play based on your cards.

That's awesome, right?

What they don't do, however, is tell you how to calculate poker equity. Nor they tell you how to combine all the information available to find out your chances of winning the hand.

If you want to become a good poker player, you need to go the extra mile. You need to understand what happens around you and how to calculate value when you don't have any third-party help available to do the (dirty) work for you.

The following example shows you a real-life poker situation and introduces you to a simple way to calculate the equity in poker.

A Real-Life Example

In a no-limit hold'em cash game, you reach the flop in a heads-up pot. The board shows .

Betting on the flop between you and a single opponent results in you being all in with the pot totalling $200.

• You turn over for a straight flush draw.
• Your your opponent has

Sadly for you, your opponent has the best hand at the moment, with a pair of aces beating your almost straight.

But not all is lost. As math shows, you have an excellent chance to be the one taking down the pot.

Even though your opponent is currently ahead in the hand, he is only a little under 44% to win the hand thanks to all of your possible outs.

You, on the other hand, are just over 56% to win.

How Did We Calculate Poker Equity?

Your equity is calculated by applying the percentage chance of winning to the amount in the pot — here 56% of $200, or $112 of equity.

Meanwhile, your opponent's equity is $88.

(Of course only one of you will win the entire $200, depending on what the turn and river bring.)

How to Use Poker Equity When You Play

In the example, we calculate poker equity exactly after the cards were tabled, but when involved in a hand you must estimate your equity in a given pot based on your read of how your hand rates versus the hand strength of your opponent(s).

Say in that example your opponent was usually very tight and had three-bet you before the flop, then led with a bet on that flop.

Given how the player has been playing, you believe it's very likely he holds a strong hand like pocket aces or pocket kings.

Knowing that you have such a strong draw and have more equity here than those hands (or indeed, than most hands), you can call or raise his flop bet.

That said, your equity can change as a hand proceeds.

Say you reach the turn in this same hand with the board showing .

With just one card to come to complete your draws, your equity versus pocket aces or pocket kings has dropped to only under 30% of the pot, which might make it difficult to continue if your opponent bets and the resulting pot odds aren't favourable.

Sometimes you'll hear players say that when short-stacked in a tournament they'd instead go all-in with a hand like than with , because if they are called they are likely to have more 'equity' (i.e., a better chance of winning the hand).

If called by a player holding , is almost 41% to win while is less than 27%. And if called by , is actually a little over 50% to win while is only about 30%.

Consistently correct decisions based on equity considerations over the long term significantly increase the likelihood of being a winning player.

Read Also: How to Play Poker. A complete collection of poker rules (and strategy tips). Use it to discover new poker games or master the ones you already know.

Poker Equity Calculators

Now that you know what is poker equity and how you can calculate it yourself, it's time to look at the best calculators available in 2020.

You should use a poker equity calculator:

• As you play: to understand your chances to win a pot
• When you review your game: to evaluate the decisions you made and learn from your mistakes
• When you examine other players' hands: to reverse-engineer their thinking process and get inside their head

In the list that follows, you find the best poker equity calculators to use in 2020 — both free and paid. Have a look at them, find the one that matches your need, and use it to bring your game to a different level.

PokerNews poker equity calculator (Free)

If you are looking for a free poker equity calculator, launch the PokerNews one and use it to recreate any scenarios you lived at the table.

The current calculator is in Flash is due to be replaced by an enhanced and all-new version in the first half of 2020.

Once that happens, you'll have on that page the best poker equity calculator in the industry. Use it to calculate your odds, value, and a lot more. No subscription needed.

Poker equity calculator Holdem Lab 2 (Free)

This handy Android app is one of the most popular Equity calculators on the Google Play Store.

The app claims to be 'the most complex' equity calculator for Android, and despite a few tiny flaws, it is indeed one that will help you improve your game.

Download the Poker equity calculator Hold'em Lab 2 Android to access features like:

• free poker equity calculator
• accurate odds calculation
• range filtering
• hands history
• and many more.

This Equity calculator app has lots of positive reviews on Google Play, and it is available for free download.

Preflop + Poker GTO Nash Charts (Free / $74.99)

Although one should always doubt the apps that claim to be 'THE best app to improve as a poker player,' Preflop + is a great one to download on iPhone, iPad, and Android.

This poker app was developed by high-stakes pro Matt Berkey and is backed by 2019 WSOP Circuit Ring winner Lara Eisenberg.

Preflop + is more than just a poker Equity calculator as it gives you also different training modules improve various aspects of your game.

Once you access the different areas of Preflop +, you get to calculate your poker equity or train for particular spots and situations.

While this is one of the best apps of its kind, it is also one you need to pay for.

Using all the features of Preflop+ and therefore gaining access to the entire training program requires a subscription.

At the time of writing, the plans available are:

• Monthly: $3.99/month
• Yearly: $31.99/year
• Unlimited: $74.99 - unlimited access, forever

If spending $75 only poker app is not a problem for you, we recommend you try this one and make it an essential part of your poker training.

Flopzilla ($25)

Flopzilla has been around for more than ten years and is one of the few poker tools that almost every player have used at least once in their life.

While the graphics look more basic than those of the most modern poker equity calculator apps, Flopzilla is a sound alternative — provided you are looking for a desktop-based option.

Besides the super-fast access to useful stats, one of the aspects of Flopzilla that we love most is the involvement of the developers in the poker community.

The Flopzilla official thread on the 2+2 Poker Forum is always very active. It is the perfect place to discuss results, ask questions, and develop new customisations of the tool.

One Flopzilla license costs $25 and gives you the right to install the software on two computers.

Flopzilla's official website states that this poker equity calculator can be installed only on computers owned by the same person.

Different individuals cannot share the same license.

You can purchase the $25 license via PayPal, Skrill, credit card, bankwire, iDeal, and a few other payment solutions.

Poker Cruncher (Free / Paid)

If you want to take your game the next level and you are ready to invest in a tool that will help you achieve your goal, have a look at Poker Cruncher.

Available on iPhone, iPad, Android, and Mac (via a dedicated app on the Mac App Store), Poker Cruncher is one of the few must-have applications that most beginners should consider purchasing.

Extremely useful for a correct poker odds calculation and hand analysis, Poker Crunches offers different paid plans — all unlimited.

At present, the plans are:

• Advanced iPhone: $12.99
• Advanced iPad: $17.99
• Advanced Android: $12.99
• Expert Mac: $44.99
• Basic iPhone: $3.99
• Basic Mac: $7.99
• Free iPhone:free

Please note that all apps are sold separately. E.g. if you buy the iPhone version of this poker equity calculator, your purchase does not include access to the iPad or Mac apps, and vice-versa.

Poker Equity F.A.Q.

When you play poker, the concept of 'equity' (also: 'value') refers to the part of a pot that is 'yours' as determined by your chances to win the hand ('odds') at a precise moment in time.

The simplest way to calculate the equity (or value) in poker is by applying your % chance to win the pot to the amount in the pot in a specific moment. For a more detailed explanation, look at this example.

Yes. You can use a free poker equity calculator for a quick analysis of a hand, or you can try a paid one to get more insights on your play. This list of poker equity calculators gives you all the top free and paid options in 2020.

About this article

This guide to poker equity includes a collection of tips that appeared on different PokeNews articles between 2003 and 2020.

A great thanks go to Neil Gibson for his Talking Poker: Equity (2015), for the example in this article, and for giving us a way to create this basic guide to equity in poker.

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It’s incredibly difficult to put your opponent on an exact hand. Therefore, most of the time, you have to think in terms of poker hand ranges. Even though you don’t have a specific idea of what cards are in your opponent’s hand, a hand range gives you something to work with.

Beginners may not have thought of this, but winning players make almost all their decisions based on poker hand ranges and knowing the different types of poker hands you might get is extremely important. Your every action changes an opponent’s idea of your hand range and vice-versa. You can have anything when cards are dealt but every fold, call or raise tells something about the range of hands you can have.

Most players fail to make the effort to figure out a hand range. However, every player who intends to be a long-term winner needs to know how to analyze and weight hand ranges.

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Poker Hand Combinations

How to use a poker range calculator? In order to be able to calculate a range of hands, the first thing you need to keep in mind is how many possible hand combinations there are for different types of hands:

So what does the table tell you?

• There are more variations of non-paired hands than pocket pairs.
  For example, if you think an opponent’s hand range is 44 and 87, it’s more likely for the opponent to have 87 (16 combinations) than 44 (six combinations).
• There are four combinations of suited non-paired hands and 12 combinations of off-suited non-paired hands. Knowing this makes it easier to calculate the likelihood of an opponent having a suited hand.

Using Hand Ranges in Poker

Here’s a scenario: you raise with AK-offsuit pre-flop and the opponent calls. You know the opponent calls in this situation 15% of the time. According to Equilab, here’s the top 15% of poker hands (although someone’s 15% can include different hands–for example, one might play 66 rather than KT-offsuit):

You have AK-offsuit, and you’d like to figure out how your hand matches up against the opponent’s hand range. So you use Equilab to calculate it and you see that AK-offsuit has 61.36% equity while the opponent has 38.64%. Sounds like a good deal for you.

Most players assume they’d do well but they have never thought their opponent’s hand range through and evaluated it against their own hand. Once you get the habit of using an equity calculator, you’ll be surprised by how much or little equity certain hands have against certain hand ranges.

Your idea of an opponent’s hand range changes with every decision the opponent makes. So let’s say, instead of calling your raise, the opponent decides to raise, which he does 3.75% of the time. Here’s the hand range:

Based on the opponent’s hand range, he’d now have ~57% equity. When he just calls, you’re still ahead of his hand range; when he re-raises, your AK-offsuit is in trouble.

Weighted Hand Ranges

How To Calculate Equity Percentage

But an opponent may play certain hands out of his hand range more often than others. For example, instead of re-raising 100% of the time with 99, he may only do so 50% of the time. Based on your reads, you assign more or less weight to a certain hand in a range of hands and, just like before, calculate how your hand does against it.

And it can make a big difference. For example, an opponent’s hand range is AA and QQ while you have KK. In case the opponent plays both AA and QQ 100% of the time in that situation, you might consider your chances of winning poker around 50%, but if the opponent plays AA 100% of the time and only plays QQ some other % of the time, your chances of winning take a hit. You’d be going against AA the majority of the time.

How to Calculate a Weighted Hand Range

So let’s say you have JJ pre-flop and you’re up against an all-in raise. You think the opponent could do this with AA, KK, QQ, AK, and AQ. How many hand combinations do you beat and how many beat you?

Hand combinations that beat you:

Hand combinations that you beat:

You beat 32 of your opponent’s hand combinations and the opponent beats you with 18 combinations. By using Equilab, we can see that your equity is 42.60%. If, however, the opponent only has AK and AQ 50% of the time (which is a relatively realistic scenario), here’s what happens:

Hand combinations that beat you v2:

Hand combinations that you beat v2:

And by using Equilab, we can see that our equity drops to about 36%. That’s a dramatic difference in the long run. which can make the difference between whether you should call or fold, which obviously depends on pot and bet sizes and how much money you and your opponent have left.

Learning to weight poker hand ranges is worth your while. Weighting hand ranges gives you more accurate information about your chances in different poker situations as long as you determine the hand combinations right. Like in almost every skill game in the world, the more complicated a theory is, the harder it is to execute and the more profitable it is when executed perfectly. With a little bit of work and thinking you’ll get more accurate calculations.

How to Manipulate Hand Ranges

Equity In Poker How To Calculate Present Value

The basic idea of manipulating hand ranges is To make strong hands look weak and the other way around. This way we can get the most out of our hands because either the opponent likes to call when we’ve got a tight range of hands – meaning we can get the money in with a strong hand – or the opponent likes to fold when we’ve got a loose range, meaning we can get the opponent to fold when we have a weak hand.

One of the biggest problems is to recognize what strong and weak play is in an opponent’s opinion. Obviously Lisa and Bart are going to read situations differently and they’re going to end up having different ideas of who’s weak and who isn’t. Another problem is to know who’s been paying attention to the game and who has other things to focus on. You have to rely on the idea that the opponent follows the game at least semi-closely and adjusts his play optimally against your range of hands. Usually it’s easy to tell who’s following the game, though.

The third problem would be to understand how an opponent reacts to the way you play. There are different ways for players to react, obviously, since otherwise all the players would play the same way. Some make logical decisions, some don’t.

All of these points must be taken into consideration when manipulating hand ranges in poker. It’s of no use to build an image for yourself if the opponent pays no attention to the game. It might be counterproductive to build an image if the opponent reacts unlike you expected. You’ll always have to consider these points when building a player image and manipulating your range.

Common Mistakes – Being Optimistic

The biggest mistake when figuring out a hand range is to have too much optimism when making decisions. For example, always believing the best and creating hand ranges that are convenient for you is a huge mistake and misses the whole idea. It’s not just about winning; it’s also about losing the least possible. By realizing your hand range is unprofitable against an opponent’s hand range, you avoid losing money.

Giving Up

Losing is a part of poker and beating most of an opponent’s range doesn’t mean you’ll win all of the pots. You’ll lose a certain percentage of them, and you may even have an extremely unlikely run of losses but such is variance.

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