Poker odds calculator — how to know equity in Texas Hold'em

17 May 2024

Calculating equity and outs in poker — why is it important? What are odds and how to determine them? To make life easier, there’s specialized online calculators, which we’ll fully describe in the material below.

How to use a poker calculator?

With the help of a calculator you can determine the odds of winning a particular poker hand against any cards or several hands at once. For example, preflop or on different boards.

The poker calculator counts the odds of one poker hand winning against another one (or a certain range of hands) on preflop, flop and turn. Roughly speaking, it takes a given situation and calculates its options a huge number of times. In this way, the poker calculator simulates an unlimited range, getting quite accurate stats.

Here’s a brief example on how to correctly use such calculators:

• First select the discipline you need: Hold'em, Shortdeck or Omaha. Last one comes in three varieties: classic, five-card and six-card. 
• Next, specify the number of players whose cards will matter in the current deal. For example, if you want to compare 3 hands, leave 3 players (you can have more if you don't specify their hands. Don’t worry, it won't affect the result.
• Then assign specific cards to each of them. For example, one to KT, another one to 88, and the last one — to AJ. You'll find the cards of all four suits to choose from below. 

How does hand seniority work?

The key concept for determining the strength of a poker hand is equity. Simply put, it is your chance of winning the pot. For example, if it's 80%, you can safely say that your hand has 80% equity in the hand. So what does «equity» have to do with it? It's easy: the chance of winning the hand is easily represented as a fraction of the pot that you are claiming.

For example, if the pot is $100 and you will win it 80% of the time, that means that over an infinite distance you will win $100 4 times out of 5 and lose $100 once. So, 80% of the time you have $100 in the pot, you are claiming $80 on average — that's how equity works.

It is possible to lose with 99%, but it will not happen very often. Any odds calculator can demonstrate this.

Equity can change, depending on your hand, the cards in your opponent's (or opponents) hand and how close you are to the final hand (i.e. preflop, flop, turn or river). If you have Aces,almost any equity calculator will tell you that against a random hand you’ll have about 85% to win. 

That's why it's always a good idea to put more money in the pot preflop with Aces. Reason is simple — there's only a 15% chance of losing! But in the later rounds, equity can drop, and then you need to play more cautiously. Let’s further look at a couple of examples to make it clearer.

Examples of comparing hands in poker

Suppose you still have the same Aces and you are playing against an opponent who has a jack and queen mixed (JQo). If you bet all your chips preflop, you will win about 86% of the time. If you continually bet like this, you'll get rich very quickly — for every dollar you invest, you'll get 86 cents on top. But that's preflop. 

We're still ahead, but we don't feel so confident anymore, the hand has less than 55% to win. The thing is that there are still 2 streets ahead (turn and river), and our opponent is helped by a lot of cards that can fall out: Eight and King will give a straight, Jack will give trips, and Queen will give two pairs. Experienced players have an approximate (and some are very accurate!) idea of what equity some hands have against others. In such cases the calculator will help a player to understand.

Other poker probabilities

Everything in poker is based on probability — including that fact how often you’ll get different hands on preflop. As we know, there are 52 cards in the deck, so it's easy to calculate how often the dealer (or a random number generator online) will deal you a particular hand. For example:

• The chance of seeing the pocket aces is 0.45%;
• If you get not only aces, but also kings, it will happen twice as often — in 0.90% of cases;
• Any pocket pair you will get is not that rare, the chance of it is 5.90%;
• One-suit AKs will come 0.3% of the time, and mixed-suit AKs three times as often (0.90%);
• Two random cards of the same suit come almost every fourth time — it’s 24% of the time.

As we mentioned above, every hand has a certain chance of winning against another hand (or range). You can't memorize them all, but there are a few key situations that will come up most often — especially in all-in preflop in tournaments. Here they are, with examples in next tables:

But that's all preflop, and when playing on the flop and turn, it's important to know how often your draws will be strengthened. It's nice to get a ready-made combo on the flop, but that will rarely happen. For example, here are the odds of getting caught on the flop with a promising hand — for example, 89 suited:

Non-suited connectors will bring flush on the river only 1.80% of the time. That is 4 times less often than the same hand of the same suit. It's best not to overvalue suited hands in general, and connectors (like 9T) are much more promising than disconnected ones (like 8T). Here’s a table that illustrates the chances of different hands strengthening on the flop:

Pot odds in poker

The most important thing related to probabilities to play poker is the pot odds (or bank chances). This concept is used to determine how favorable a call will be in a particular case. For example, 1 in 4 odds means that you must win the hand at least 20% of the time for a call to be justified. 

This is also where the concept of outs — that is, the number of cards that will help you put together the right combination. For example, if you have KQ with hearts and 36A5 with two hearts on the board, your outs will be the 9 remaining hearts. The probability of buying any of the necessary outs on the river is just over 2%.

For example, if you need to call a bet of 200 into a pot of 800, your pot odds are 4 to 1, meaning you should win the hand 20% of the time. 

If your call odds are higher (i.e. you have enough outs), you can call. There are also potential odds — chips that will probably still be invested in the hand later on. In order to call with profit, it's important to know what your odds are in different situations. That's where calculators and their stats will be very appropriate.

Top 12 poker calculators in 2024

To make your life easier, we have selected 13 best and time-tested poker hands calculators:

• Flopzilla. FZ is not just a Texas Hold'em Poker odds calculator, but also one of the best tools available for developing the skill of range thinking. It's no secret that the best poker players, when making decisions, operate with spectra rather than trying to put their opponent on a particular hand.
• FreeBetRange. It’s an online range manager. It helps to create your own preflop strategy and apply it in the game using «Editor» and «Demo» sections. Also it imports ready-made ranges from Flopzilla, Equilab and other solvers.
• CardRunners EV. CREV is a powerful tool for analyzing and calculating the expectation matrix of your game given the ranges and draw lines you specify. Although CardRunners does not claim to be the simplest program in the world. It will not seem very complicated to those who work with it for a while. It can find non-exploited strategies, help you find hands with negative expectation from given ranges, build expectation-matrix graphs and much more.
• Power Equilab. It’s the latest equity calculator with a wider range of equity calculations and many other useful features, created especially for PRO players who are no longer satisfied with the standard Equilab. The program combines the capabilities of equilators and analytical tools.
• Simple Preflop Holdem. This poker calculator is designed to analyze preflop play in Texas Holdem. With this program, you can compute optimal strategies based on specified trees and input ranges for varying numbers of players across different preflop scenarios. It enables local calculations for preflop situations in different poker formats and models, such as ChipEV and ICM, while also factoring in rake.
• The HoldemResources Calculator. HRC stands out as the top pick for seasoned tournament poker players seeking a deep dive into strategies and scenarios. It empowers players to compute optimal strategies rooted in game theory and Nash equilibrium, analyzing hands and ranges, simulate gameplay, making it an essential tool for master one's gameplay.
• Simple 3-Way. This poker calculator is tailored for analyzing optimal strategies in 3-way scenarios. Using this program, you can construct Game Theory Optimal (GTO) strategies based on predefined trees and input ranges for 3 players across various postflop situations. With Simple 3-Way, you can visualize Expected Value (EV) and equity for all hands played within the decision tree's contexts. The program offers free features for conducting calculations on the river, along with pre-made examples illustrating basic flop situations to help users get acquainted with its functionality.
• Simple Omaha. This software stands as the pioneering poker solver specifically designed to dissect postflop scenarios in Omaha without resorting to abstractions. This cutting-edge program constructs Game Theory Optimal (GTO) strategies by leveraging defined trees and input ranges for two players across diverse postflop contexts. With Simple Omaha, users can conduct calculations for all formats. Thanks to its adaptable betting tree configurations, the program seamlessly handles fixed-limit, no-limit, and pot-limit Omaha calculations, offering useful stats for Omaha enthusiasts.
• oRanges Calculator. It’s an equity calculator, which is not inferior in its functionality and characteristics to more popular analogs, but for a lower price. Also there’s other Oranges 6+ Calc. It’s a program for calculating equity of hand ranges in Short Deck Holdem.
• PokerCruncher. It’s a poker equity calculator for Texas Hold'em that works on all Apple devices and Android gadgets. Initially developed only for mobile devices, but later a version for desktop PCs with extended functionality.
• CombCalc6Plus. A program for those who want to develop their understanding of the peculiarities of Short Deck Hold'em. It calculates the odds of a hand against the opponents' spectra.
• Odds Oracle. It's an online poker auxiliary software that will allow you to instantly get calculations of simple things like pot odds or equity, as well as more complex sequences. The program will be especially useful for tournament players, due to its ICM model calculations, which will improve your results in SnG and MTT.

How to improve the game with a poker odds calculator?

There are also much more advanced calculators and training programs. They allow you to calculate which hands will hit the board and how often, and even suggest optimal solutions in specific situations. Everybody knows that such software is called solvers.

If you're in the mood for some serious work on your game, we recommend checking out Flopzilla. This is an advanced calculator that will quickly teach you to think in terms of ranges and allow you to memorize how often and what combinations you will get with different hands. The usefulness of such lessons is hard to overestimate, and the price of the software is quite democratic. Now it’s only $25 for a full license.

Frequently Asked Questions 

Why do you need a poker calculator?

The program helps to determine the probability with which a given hand will win against another one or several hands. By memorizing the probabilities in common situations, players make less mistakes during a poker session.

How does a poker hand calculator work?

The program takes the situation you set and repeatedly calculates different scenarios. In this way, the calculator simulates a long distance, obtaining accurate probabilities — down to hundredths of one percent.

What does equity mean?

This is the chance of winning the pot with a particular hand at a particular moment. This chance is expressed as a percentage — and therefore the share of the pot you are claiming. For example, if there is $100 in the bank and your equity is 80%, then your share of the pot on the range is $80.

How to use a pot odds calculator?

It depends. In general you should select the number of players in the hand and set their starting hands. Then you can find out the probability of winning each combination pre-flop. You can also set the board cards for postflop odds calculations.

How to work on your game using a poker equity calculator?

Equity Calculator is a fairly simple program that is more suitable for beginners. If you want to develop your poker game level, there are more advanced calculators. The most popular one is Flopzilla. It not only compares the strength of hands, but also shows how often different hands will hit the board — and in what combinations. It helps you learn to think in terms of poker ranges.