Poker Equity Explained

In poker, every decision you make is influenced by the chances you have of winning the hand. You want to get your chips in the middle when you are getting favorable odds to call or raise if you have the best chance of winning the hand. Making these correct decisions will ensure that you are a winning player in the long run.

If you are not familiar with poker equity it refers to the probability of a good outcome (winning the hand), displayed as a percentage. It can be critical to calculate poker equity on the spot when you find yourself in all in situations, which is a common situation when playing on a table with short stack players, or playing a short stack poker strategy yourself. I don’t advocate playing short stacked poker because its not profitable to play hands you would normally play when you are playing deep stacked poker, but that’s a topic for another article.

Knowing your poker equity gives you the ability to compare your equity against your opponent’s range of hands. It’s a calculation you need to be able to calculate on the spot, because short stacker’s are looking to shove preflop or on the flop. It’s also common in deep stack poker games when playing in aggressive games and players aren’t scared to get stacks in the middle preflop.

In order to make the correct decisions on the spot, you need to familiarize yourself with specific hands and how they compare to specific hand ranges. This calculation will tell you what equity you have against a certain range of hands. Obviously this can be very difficult to determine in the heat of the moment during a game, but if you have studied the equity of hands vs hand ranges away from the table, you can use this knowledge to your advantage during games when you are put to a tough decision.

When you are not playing poker, spend some time to calculate poker equity using <a href=”http://www.pokerstove.com/” target=”_blank”>Pokerstove</a>, which is a free poker tool you should play around with away from the tables. It’s a very straightforward tool. Basically, as discussed above, you are dealing with hand ranges or specific hands.

Here is a situation you may find yourself in when playing against a short stack player who you have some history with. You are dealt AKo and you know this particular short stacker is shoving with a range which consists of (TT+,ATs+,AJo+).

If you input this hand range into Pokerstove vs AKo, you can see that you have about 55% equity to call the shove with AKo, so it would be profitable to call a shove from the short stack player.

Always think about hand ranges and how well your range does against your opponents range. The better you get at putting your opponents on ranges, the better your decisions will become and you will make more money in poker over the long run.

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