Discovering a Poker Equity Calculator

     Today we are going to be discussing how I discovered actually using a poker equity calculator for the first time. I had always seen the square charts with a million little boxes on them and I knew if it looked like a lot of them were colored in that meant loose, but I had never taken the time or had the faith I could learn a set of ranges.  I had even watched videos of people doing things with Flopzilla and it kind of washed over me while I waited for the part of the video where I got to watch someone play poker.  

     This time around I promised myself to learn how to use an efficient set of tools in order to have reinforced feedback during my study sessions without a partner.  I knew that involved getting familiar with the squares filled with boxes I had seen everywhere.  As I stated earlier the one I had heard of was Flopzilla, but when I came back to poker everyone was recommending Equilab so I snagged that one instead.

     I clicked on it and immediately realized I needed to watch a video on how to use it.  I went over to YouTube and found something that was about ten minutes long, there are about a thousand to choose from, and I took notes as it played.  Nothing too complex.  It seems dumb that I have to click so many times to change the suits, but I’m not here to criticize this program that has already helped me so much.

     When I returned to my new program with all my new learnings in tow, I was also packing a list of tagged hands I wanted to check out.  Hands like JJ getting it in preflop where I was always just guessing, now I had the opportunity to figure out how the pot odds looked against different tightnesses of the opponent.

     For a long time that was all I did, just check all in equity of my hands where I went bust and wanted to call it a cooler.  You have to admit, it is an easy way to get out of having to learn anything from a particular hand…  “It was just a cooler, dude.”  Brain off, next hand.

     Then I got lucky enough to have a coach find me and offer to help me out for free and they showed me how they had been using equilab and it opened up a lot of new things for me.  I could check the equity of later street hands against the changing range of my opponent.  I could compare that to pot and implied odds and figure out if my plays were right in those spots too…  more coolers! 

     Then one day we started walking through all the hands with the range chart up.  We started off by guessing what we thought their opening range would be preflop based on their positions and any stats we had on them.  Then as the cards came and action progressed we continued to say “Okay so if they call that bet, what hands can’t they have?” And we started clicking them off one by one and then we moved on to the next street and did the same thing.  By the time we ended up on the river, the choice was clear.  “They could never be making trip 8’s here because they don’t have any 8’s left in their range.  So I should’ve called! DAMNIT!!!”  Lol, just keeping it honest here people.

     That completely changed the way I think about poker.  I see the charts with their little squares lighting up to start the hand and as we go along they click off one by one.  It isn’t perfect, it just helps…  a lot!  However, there is always an adjustment period with anything.  There definitely was a downside to the early days of learning to range people.

     I was prone to a new kind of tilt I had never built up a defense for.  When I ran into a hand that I “knew they couldn’t have,” it would make me mad (probably because it was injuring my ego.)  I have never read about this particular one, but when you first start to get good at clicking off the boxes, be on guard for this kind of psychic power tilt.  You are just narrowing down PROBABILITIES, you are not turning into season 1 high stakes poker Daniel Negraneu here.  We aren’t calling out exact combinations, we are just trying to strengthen our edge on our opponents somewhat.  Sometimes they still have the 8!!!

      Thanks for reading this post and coming back if you are one of my regular readers.  If you want to check out my crazy poker history you can click here and if you want to read a recent article about finding the roots of poker suffering click here.  Thanks again for reading and I hope you come back and subscribe.