The left side is a starting hand matrix where the pocket pairs run diagnally, the bottom left is unsuited hands, and the top right is suited hands. When we open the hand range window we see a lot of options. Don’t worry if you disagree with this assumption, we’ll just use it for the time being. For simplicities sake we’ll give him 99+/AQ+. Let’s click the hand range button for this player and enter the range of hands we think he would likely shove with here. In poker we rarely know our opponent’s exact hole cards, and thus we work in terms of ranges, or groups of likely starting hands. Next we need to enter in a range of hands for the shortstack so we can calculate our equity against them. You could also manually type in AdKs on our row… Click OK and the hand is automatically entered on our line. In this situation we can start by entering our hole cards, so we click the hand button and enter AdKs. Say we play aggressive with Ace King and open-raise preflop, a short stack player goes all-in, and it folds back to us. Let’s start by doing a basic calculation to highlight the process. We can enter a random range by clicking the button with two dice, clear a hand/range out with the red X, or use the green carrot to choose from a preset of ranges based upon the action of a particular villain. We can click the button that looks like 2 stacked cards enter specific hole cards such as our own. We can click the button that looks like a stack of cards to input a range. We can enter cards and ranges a bunch of different ways. On their respective line we can input a range of hands, or exact hole cards, and on the right we can see their equity.
To start, let’s look at the Equilab interface and understand what’s going on.Īlong the left we have different positions that represent players. We won’t have the time to use this tool in real-time…but with enough off-table practice you will develop an intuition.
#Poker equity calculator pokerstrategy how to#
We can use this equity to make better plays both preflop and postflop, so knowing how to calculate our equities away from the table is very beneficial. Essentially we use equity calculators to figure out equity against our opponent’s actual hand, or the range of hands they likely have. If you’ve never used a poker equity calculator this may seem a bit daunting…but with some practice using this tool becomes a piece of cake.