A few years ago, players might have referred to themselves as “math players” or “feeling players,” and if they had a good advantage in either of those areas, they were more than likely winners. Today, with the ever-evolving skill set of the general player pool, you need to have a good understanding of the mathematical concepts of poker as well as a solid, intuitive edge to stay afloat. One of these crucial mathematical concepts is poker equity or in other words known as pot equity. In this article, we will detail some of the basic ideas about what is poker equity and how you can use it for your benefit. So, let’s get started.
Definition of Poker Equity?
In poker, equity refers to the portion of the pot that is yours based on the probability (percentage) that you will win the hand at any given time. (To put it another way, equity is the percentage value that indicates the chance of a win in poker)
For example, if there is $1,000 in the pot and you are currently an 80% favourite to win the hand, your pot equity is $800.
Poker Strategy Based on Equity
The general winning poker strategy to follow when you have an equity advantage over your opponent is to bet on value.
This fact has two primary reasons:
You gain equity in the pot when your opponent calls. Imagine you put $500 into a $1,000 pot and have an 80% equity advantage. If your opponent calls, you get $400 equity (80% x your opponent’s $500 call) from the pot.
You can prevent your opponent from realizing their equity (by betting and giving them the opportunity to fold). Imagine your opponent has 20% equity and you can fold after your bet. While you had 80% equity at the time, you tricked your opponent into folding, which awarded you 100% equity in the pot.
The difficult thing about poker is that player equity is constantly changing during a hand – from preflop to flop to river. Therefore, you must continuously evaluate and re-evaluate your opponent’s likely hands and/or range, and then properly determine how your hand and/or range stacks up against it to better deduce what course of action you should take in the action.
What is Poker Equity Range?
The unfortunate thing about what we’ve discussed about poker equity so far is that you’ll probably never know exactly what your opponent’s hand is. Because of this, it’s important that you give your opponents a range of poker hands and then calculate your equity against their hand range.
However, if you are having trouble identifying accurate equity of hand versus hand situations, then finding equity for hand versus range and range versus range will be quite impossible. For this reason, training with Equity Calculator and practising with numerous different situations away from the table is a must.