Figuring out equity in your head, during a hand, w/out PokerStove (newbie question)

Newbie question here.... I've been doing a lot of postmortems lately on individual hands, using PokerStove to figure out my equity, posting them, etc. A lot of times the results don't surprise me at all, but often it does. I'm curious how people figure out equity (just roughly I mean) when you're playing a hand? If you don't have a read on your opponent, and you're just trying to get a ballpark idea of your equity before you play the rest of the hand, is there a way to crunch the numbers and come up with it w/out the luxury of PokerStove?

Here's an example. Keep in mind it's a math question here, not a strategy question.

On the flop I have A K, there are 3 other opponents, and the board is K 8 3. With TPTK, no draws, and a safe board, it's not surprising that my equity is (apparently) 70% w/ the three other villains at 10%. Great, I'm a big favorite, no s--t. But is it feasible to come up with that 70% number on the fly while you're playing? I mean, is there a simple formula people use? I guess I'm asking in part because although I understand why certain hands dominate others, I kinda get how PStove gets it's #s, I don't how to come up with them w/ out software like this.

Again, I'm talking about coming up w/ rough estimates here and not about strategy. Am I just not good w/ numbers or is there something I'm missing.

How do you come up with your equity in real time?
Experiance. You know your equity vs all the different hands your opponent could have and you estimate how much of their range they each are and pick a suitable middle point between your equity against their potential hands.

In other words, don't worry about it, keep doing what you're doing and it will come naturally. If you want to be ridiculously accurate, dunno, you're going to have to specialise your knowledge on this area.

The most important factor here though is determining villain's range as accurately as possible. In your example you left out stack sizes, position, pre-flop action, even possibly information on the other players. Yes, this part is strategy, but the equity cannot be calculated usefuly if the range you put them on is innacurate.

Also worth noting is that your equity now means pretty much nothing. What matters is what happens to your equity after you all take various actions as your equity can plummet or rise dramatically. Also if an opponent is a calling station, your equity will stay a lot higher even after they've called multiple bets and since you know this before making those bets, it changes the hand dramatically.


So yeah, there's my strategy/math answer without any numbers. I just don't know how you can usefuly seperate strategy and math.

Well I guess I wasn't sure if coming up with a raw # that reflects the probability of my hand winning at the showdown was useful to know as a kind of, I dunno, basis for determing how to proceed in that hand. So for example, that hand above has a 70% of winning against 3 opp holding w/ any random cards. Obviously, I'm not really going to assume all of my opponents will literally play w/ ATC all the time. But I wasn't sure if your thought process (in real time at the table) would be, like...

"Ok, I know that TPTK on a dry board vs 3 opponents is about ~70% ... and I know one of the villains has an average range and two of them are super nits ... so my equity is really got to be less than 70% ... probably more like 60% maybe ... I can't be sure (since I don't have PokerStove embedded in my brain) but it's definitely less ... so now if I bet, two will probably call, which give means my implied odds are ..." Well you get the idea.

Basically, I'm just wondering about how the thought process works as you play a hand, and whether you start w/ a raw math-based equity %, then work through the strategy stuff after that. Does that make sense?

Right, so maybe one doesn't proceed the other, but it's more of a chicken or-the-egg kind of thing.