Poker Equity

What is Poker Equity and how to take advantage from it?

Equity is a very important concept that plays a very big role in shaping poker strategies and making complex calculated moves. It's also pretty easy to understand what it is:

Let's say that you and I are playing heads-up no-limit poker. Furthermore, it's televised (for some bizarre reason), so the audience at home know what we each have. If you have ever seen poker on TV, then you know how this works - they show your hand to the left next to your name. When all the hands are known, many shows then display how likely each hand is to win the pot at showdown, by some percentage. The commentator may say something like "He's 78% to win here, but he doesn't know it!" Those percentages show the average amount of times that the specific hands will hold up to win once all the cards are dealt. This is usually calculated with simulators, using a computer's power to check the outcome of very large numbers of possible sequences on the flop, turn and river.

And that's all there's to it - that given percentage constitutes your equity in the pot, at this point. Of course, the equity numbers for each hand will change a lot once the flop comes. Even a huge favorite like AA could suddenly find itself drawing dead (equity = 0%) after the flop when someone flops a straight flush. But flopped straight flushes are freak occurrences, and in the long run, whatever percentage the AA was to win pre-flop will prevail. There are great tools like our poker odds calculator that can show you your exact equity in any given situation (if you know the hands involved).

Poker Equity When on a Draw

The above example is an obvious application of equity, and one that everyone almost instinctively gets right - raising with the best hand is a good move. Here's a key point, though: Sometimes, you can raise with a hand that is not the best hand right now but has such a big chance of becoming the best hand that you still make money from betting immediately. And I'm not talking about semi-bluffs here, I'm talking about situations where you bet or raise, hoping that everyone will call you, despite having only a high-card hand. One of the most desirable examples of this is when you have the top two cards of a straight flush draw. For example, imagine you are holding:

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Imagine in this hand there are three other people with you seeing this flop. Somehow, you know that one of them has a pair of jacks, one has a pair of tens and the third guy has a pair of treys. Neither of them hold a king, queen, ace or nine in their hands, nor any spades. Of course, I'm describing a perfect scenario here, but play along for now.

A quick lookup using an odds calculator shows that we have a whopping 65% equity. Again, we can happily invest any amount of money on this flop, expecting to win back 65% of all the bets that go in. But now we're an even better situation than the example above - we only put in one out of four dollars going in; above, we had to pay half. For every dollar we pay here, we will win back $2.6. This is, strangely enough, a better situation for us than flopping top pair, top kicker in a heads-up pot. We have a lot of equity because of the many cards that will give us the best hand, and the two chances we have of hitting those cards. In our invented scenario, we have as many as 9 flush outs, 6 over card outs, and another 6 straight outs (that aren't also flush outs) = 21 outs, or 21 cards in the deck that our opponents need to dodge twice to win. That's almost half of the remaining deck.

So here we find a proper place to raise because we have high equity even with a non-made hand. A more common situation is when we have the nut flush draw on the flop (although it doesn't have to be as extreme as it was here where we also had straight and over card outs). Our flush will arrive somewhere around 35% of the time before or on the river, which means that unless the board if paired, we have 35% equity in this pot. With two or more opponents, raising this flop is correct! We expect to win 35% of every bet that goes in, and if we put in less than one third of the bets (which we would be with two opponents), then we're winning money in the long run. This is a very common tactic among intermediate players (sometimes even over- and incorrectly used), and understanding why it's a winning play means understanding equity.

There are advanced tactics that rely heavily on complex equity calculations, one of the most well-known being the semi-bluff. Here, the play requires a certain amount of fold equity (or "chance that opponent will fold times his current equity in the pot") in order to be a winning move. Fold equity will be discussed in more detail in our article on semi-bluffs.

Poker Fundamentals series written by Fredrik Paulsson.