I’ve been writing a lot lately about the importance of understanding how much equity your hand has against your opponent’s range, and a lot of people have quite reasonably asked how to figure that out at the table, when Poker Stove is unavailable or impractical. Thus, my January article for 2+2 Magazine is an example of how to use rough estimates to make real-time decisions and in particular how to recognize the factors that cause your equity to be what it is in a given spot. Here’s an excerpt:
“Interestingly, if Villain has a one-pair hand, he barely affects our equity at all. If we assume that the big blind has 87, then letting the middle position player stay in the pot with 65 costs us only about 3.5% equity. This is because unless Villain’s kicker dominates one of Hero’s pair outs (i.e., unless Villain has something like T7 or A6 that kills one of our outs), then he will rarely affect the outcome of the hand. Either Hero draws out to a hand that beats both of his opponents, or he does not improve, in which case he would have lost to the big blind whether or not the third player was in the pot.”
By all means, please let me know what you think of it!
“If Villain has 98, then a T heart or 5 heart on the turn will probably result in a huge win for Hero.”
Hero is holding the ten of heart.
Otherwise I thought it was an insightful article. To expand on it how would you use equity estimation to make the right decision for the MP player with the flopped straight in a multi-way pot out of position?