Deal cards to two seats
Put two seats in the hand and the pot shares appear here.
Estimated over 40,000 simulated runouts. Equity is each seat's average share of the pot, chops split evenly.
Equity is the share of the pot your hand is worth right now: how often it wins if every remaining card is dealt. The calculator above runs your hand against a real solver opening range rather than a single hand, because a single hand is not what you are ever actually against.
The percentage of the time your hand wins at showdown, given everything known so far. Ace-king against pocket queens is 46% equity, meaning it wins a little under half the time if all five board cards come out.
Equity is not the same as your chance of winning the pot. Hands get folded, bets get through, and money is won without showdown. Equity only answers the narrow question of who has the better hand once every card is dealt, which is exactly the input a calling decision needs and nothing more.
Because you never know their two cards, and the answer changes enormously depending on which two you assume.
Ace-king is a 46% underdog against pocket queens. Against ace-queen it is a 74% favourite. Against a button opening range, which contains both of those and eighty-five other hands, it is 63%. Only the third number is usable at the table, because it is the only one that reflects what is actually in front of you.
That is why the calculator defaults to a range rather than a hand. Every preset here is an exported solver range, with each hand weighted by how often the solver plays it: a hand raised 48.6% of the time counts as roughly half a combination, not a whole one. Treating mixed hands as fully in the range quietly overstates how strong your opponent is, which is the error a hand-built range makes by construction.
Most calculators ask you to type a range yourself, or offer a slider for “the top 20% of hands” sorted by raw strength. That sorting is wrong in a specific way: a solver opens 76s and 44 from the button while folding hands that rank above them on raw equity, because position and playability matter and raw equity does not know about either. The full opening charts show the real shapes.
Enough to beat the price you are being offered, which is a pot odds question rather than an equity one. The two numbers only mean something together.
| Bet you face | Equity you need |
|---|---|
| Third pot | 20% |
| Half pot | 25% |
| Two-thirds pot | 28.6% |
| Full pot | 33.3% |
So if the calculator gives you 40% against their range and you are facing a half-pot bet, calling is profitable by a clear margin. At 22% against a pot-sized bet it is not, and no amount of hoping changes it.
No, and treating it as though it does is the most common way this number gets misused. Equity tells you who is ahead if the hand goes to showdown with no more betting, and real hands have more betting: fold equity, position and the money you win on later streets all live outside this percentage. A flush draw with 36% equity is a clear call when hitting it wins a large pot on the river, and a clear fold against someone who shuts down the moment the flush card lands. The number is an input, not a verdict.
The presets are the same solver ranges the PlusEV trainer deals, exported straight from the app rather than approximated for the web. That is the part a generic calculator cannot copy: not the arithmetic, which is standard, but knowing what a real opening range from each seat actually contains.
Knowing your equity and producing the right fold at the table are different skills, and only one of them is arithmetic. Across 1,043,612 measured post-training hands, intermediate players gained +0.061 BB per hand after 30 days of drilling exactly these spots. The calculator answers the question; the reps are what make you stop needing it.
