In the last post, we talked about our opponent’s range, or possible hands he could be holding. Now that we’ve successfully put our opponent on a range of hands, it’s time to figure out our equity in the pot.
Equity, in its simplest terms, is our stake in the pot. It’s the percentage of times our hand will win against our opponents. By figuring our equity in the pot, we can then make decisions based around our equity, and it will be easier to know if continuing the hand is profitable in the long-term. As a quick reminder, we must remember that it is not necessary to put our opponent on his two exact cards, but merely a range of what he or she could be playing. Let’s look at an example:
Let’s say we’re playing a six-handed $1/$2 cash game and we are in late position with K♥Q♥. It is folded around to us and we raise it to $7. The small blind folds and the big blind calls. The pot is $15. Now the flop comes A♥Q♣5♦. We’ve caught a piece of this flop, but there is an overcard to our Q on the board. The big blind checks and we bet $11, which the big blind then calls. The pot is now $37. Here’s where we should stop and take a second to analyze the hand with the information we have.
The big blind called out of position, meaning he knows he’ll be first to act on every betting round. This should lead us to believe that he may have a stronger hand than ours. However, we can take hands like AA, AK, and AQ out of his range as he more than likely would have re-raised us before the flop. With our bet and his call we can safely put hands like AJ, AT, A9 suited, or A2-A5 suited in his range. It is also possible that he could have a hand like QJ, QT, or even KQ in his hand. There is also a slim chance that he could be holding 55 and is slow-playing a set of 5’s. Against any hand like AJ, AT, A9, A4, A3, or A2, our equity is essentially the same. We need to catch another Q or a K to win the pot. Going back to the Rule of Four and Two we can estimate our equity by multiplying our number of outs (3 Ks and 2 Qs). This gives us an estimated equity of 20%, so only one in five times will we win this pot outright. However, what if our opponent thinks that we don’t have any pair and is defending with a hand like QJ? That only gives him three outs (3 Js) to take the pot from us, putting his equity at around 12% and giving us an 88% chance of winning the pot. Lastly, what if our opponent is holding A5? This would be one of the worst hands our opponent could have against us because even if we hit a K and make two-pair, our opponent is still beating us. Our equity in this situation is roughly 13%.
We will receive more information on the hand during later betting rounds, and that’s when our next post will come in handy. In this post I just wanted to cover how to calculate equity based on our perceived range of our opponent’s hand.
Next week we will cover the final part of the REM Process which is the “M” which stands for “maximize”.
As always, questions and comments are welcome.
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