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Equilab is a poker software that about 90% of players use to perform quality poker calculations, study ranges, and save hundreds of hours studying hands between sessions. But don’t forget that advanced software can be a bit confusing to use, so we’ve put together a handy guide to get you started with Power Equilab. Whether you’ve been using Equilab for years or are just discovering it today, this guide is designed to help you use the tool more efficiently. Let’s just right in!
What is Equilab?
Equilab is a powerful poker equity calculator from PokerStrategy.com. This tool is like PokerStove on steroids with some Flopzilla elements in it. Power Equilab was developed to help online poker players. It helps you calculating equity and analyzing hands, and has othr useful features. The concept of equity is the basis of poker mathematics.
Not everyone can calculate equity on the fly, but if you make decisions ignoring equity, the game will be more risky and dangerous. Power Equilab will do all the calculations instantly, and you will immediately find the ground to push from, you will find the basis for making the right decision.
Calculating equity on each street will help you better understand where you stand in the hand and decide whether it is worth continuing with a certain combo. Perhaps, professional players, taking into account millions of hands they have played, can already do without programs like Power Equilab in small pots, but beginners simply have no right to ignore such help. Equilab has a version for Hold’em and Omaha, so use the one that suits you best.
The Difference between the Free and Paid Versions of Equilab
There are two types of Equilab. The most common is the free version of Equilab, which is perfect for 99% of players. For more advanced poker players, there is an in-depth version called “Power-Equilab” which costs around $42 per year.
The key difference between the free and Power versions is how deeply you can narrow and calculate ranges. Power Equilab allows you to perform equity calculations on ranges, sub-ranges, weighted ranges, heatmaps, and detailed equity graphs when studying poker ranges.
How to Use Equilab?
If you’ve never used a poker equity calculator before, it might seem a little intimidating, but with some practice, it becomes a rather mundane task. Essentially, we use an equity calculator to determine our equity against our opponent’s actual hand or a range of hands they are likely to have.
We can use this equity to make better decisions both pre-flop and post-flop, so knowing how equity is calculated away from the table is very useful. We won’t have time to use this tool in real time, but with enough experience of working with equity away from the tables, you’ll develop an intuition.
First, let’s take a look at the Equilab interface and understand what’s going on there.
On the left there are different positions representing players. There we can enter a range of hands or exact hole cards, and on the right, we can see their equity.
Adding Hands and Ranges
We can enter hands and ranges in a number of ways. We can click the button that looks like a stack of cards to enter a range. We can click the button that looks like 2 stacked cards to enter a specific hand.
We can also enter a random range by clicking the button with 2 dice, clear the hand/range with the red X, or use the green carrot to select one of the preset ranges based on a specific opponent’s actions.
Let’s start with some basic math to illustrate the process. Let’s say we open-raise preflop AK. The short stack goes all-in and everyone else folds. In this situation, we can start by entering our hole cards, so we click the “Hand” button and enter AdKs.
We then click “OK” and the hand will appear in the range line. You can also manually enter AdKs using keyboard in this same line:
Next, we need to enter a hand range for the short stack so we can calculate our equity against them. In poker, we rarely know our opponent’s exact hole cards, so we work with ranges, or groups of likely starting hands. Let’s click the “Hand Range” button for this player and enter a range of hands we think he’s likely to push with. Let’s just assume it’s 99+/AQ+ for simplicity. Don’t worry if you disagree with this assumption, we’ll just go with it for now.
By opening the hand range window, we see a variety of options. On the left is a matrix of starting hands, with pocket pairs running diagonally, the bottom left are bad hands, and the top right are optimal hands. There are many ways to select ranges, such as clicking on hands in the matrix, dragging the sliding bar at the bottom, or selecting one of the predefined hand ranges on the right. We generally recommend creating your own ranges rather than using predefined ones. However, if you have never practiced creating ranges, predefined ranges can be a good starting point. Let’s select 99+/AQ+. A quick tip for those who want to save time: if you hold down the control key and click 99, it will automatically select 99 and all pairs above it. Likewise, if you hold down the control key and click AQ, it will select AQ AND AK. This is especially useful for constructing wider ranges. Now that we have selected a range we were looking for, just click “OK” at the bottom and the range will be added to the line.
Finding Equity Using Equilab
To calculate the equity of our AK against his 99+/AQ+ range, we now click the Evaluate button at the bottom. There are two evaluation modes: Enumerate all and Monte Carlo. I recommend using Enumerate all as it is faster. Once we click Evaluate, we can see that our AK has 48.65% equity.
We can also see that we have the text results of our analysis at the bottom. This is handy if you want to share your findings on forums and save them for later reference.
In this particular hand, we can simply compare our equity to the current pot odds and make a decision. Here, we are getting 1.3:1 on a call and need at least 43% equity. Equilab shows that we have almost 49% equity, meaning we can make a profitable call! This doesn’t mean we’ll win 100% of the time when we call, but we’ll win often enough in the long run to make this call profitable, given the range of hands we think MP would push with.
In a similar way, you can do many analytical calculations, including simple EV calculations.
We can also use Equilab for postflop play. Just add hands and ranges the same way we did above, but be sure to add all known postflop cards before hitting the Evaluate button. For example, if the flop was J♦T♥5♠, we could hit the flop button, add JT5, and hit OK. You could repeat this process for the turn and river cards as well. Then hit the Evaluate button and find your equity.
Equilab has some other cool features, too. For example, if we flop J♦T♥5♠, we can click on the pie chart icon for our opponent. Now we can see exactly how his range hits this flop. We see that 13% of his range is sets, 27% is overpairs, etc. This is very useful when analyzing hands away from the table to see how ranges hit different boards.
What Makes Power Equilab Different from Similar Software
This software is not a simple equity calculator. Power Equilab is a multifunctional program that allows you to:
- Calculate equity with range variations on all streets;
- Exclude cards (dead cards);
- Calculate the frequency of being ahead on each street and the frequency of hitting the flop;
- Select built-in ranges and create your own;
- Create sub-ranges using icons and color markers.
There are other ways to use Equilab, but now you know how to use this tool generally and calculate equity yourself. Remember, the more practice you get with equity calculations, the more ingrained they will become into your mind and the easier it will be to evaluate equity in real time.
Datamining as an Important Addition
Today we have reviewed one of the best poker equity calculators. In addition to the above, the Power Equilab has other useful functions that will help you become a successful online poker player. Use it, analyze your game and earn money! And if you want to adapt GTO to a real game, we strongly recommend adding poker hand datamining to your arsenal. Using Power Equilab with hand history datamining allows players to improve their decision-making process at the table significantly. By analyzing large databases of hands, a player can identify certain patterns in the behavior of other players and determine the ranges of hands they play with. With the help of Power Equilab, you can simulate postflop scenarios and evaluate how to play against those ranges. The program allows you to evaluate equity against specific ranges and helps make decisions that are more informed during the game. Thus, getting those hand histories and analyzing them through Power Equilab gives the player a strategic advantage, allowing you to better understand your opponents and adjust your game depending on their style.
