The pot is 100$. Villain bets 50$ on the flop. As you know by now, the pot odds offered to you, are 25%. So, you need 25% to win. Should you call with the second pair? Well, you might think, it depends on the hand he has. Ok, let’s say he has an overpair. Should you call, getting 25% on your call? Why, or why not? Meet equity.
In the previous post, we borrowed Phil Hellmuth to introduce the basic concept of pot odds. Yes, it’s a basic concept, but I bet many of you don’t have your odds and percentages memorized to the point of automatism, which is the only good enough level. That’s why we provided you with the simple chart all of our students use and memorize. In case you missed it, you can download it below. You will get 4 different versions, including desktop wallpaper variants to use as your background. These are the very basics, and you do need to know them.
The second part of this simple concept is the concept of equity. Now, these 2 concepts are so inter-related, that Phil explains them both in his video. So go back to it, if you’re not sure what equity is. Or, take a look at this CardsChat article on the topic, make sure you understand the concept. After you do, you are ready to practice your understanding of equity. And this is the focus of my article. Just as with pot odds, it is not enough to understand the concept, in theory, you have to know the numbers on the fly at the tables, when you are playing.
Let’s say you are facing a bet. You have to know what the odds being offered to you are, given the size of the bet, and you have to know if your hand has enough equity to call that bet. The first part you should know by now. The second part you will know after finishing the article. So, how do you practice equity? First, you will need an equity calculator. We can recommend a tool like Equilab, which is free and commonly used. Once you have it, you can start practicing.
Take a look at the video below, to see the exact steps how our CFP students are practicing daily. In fact, you can browse their blogs and see many of them post results of their practice every day. Being a former CFP student myself, I remember the origin of this daily practice from back in the day. As far as I know, the first guy in the CFP who started practicing this regularly was Rylan. Yup, that’s right, the current record CFP HU finisher, who hit almost $9000 on his best day during his epic run from 0 to 60k in 8 months – which is still the daily record in all of the CFP. If you browse through his blog, you will find countless equity calculations – given his results, it’s no surprise we all started doing them pretty soon as well… 🙂 And so should you. Take a look at the video below, and learn how to do it the BPC way.
So this was the basic equity exercise we all started doing. And, BPC would not be BPC, if we didn’t wind ways to improve on everything. So, soon Oskar, our fellow student, made an awesome program called UhlvarEquity, which made this practice even faster and, well, more fun! Check out the video guide from Oskar himself, to learn about this cool little program:
The UhlvarEquity program took off in the BPC community, and everybody is using it these days. You can come up with your own ways of using it and testing yourself, for example, a popular variation of testing yourself is demonstrated in the video below by BPC founder and head coach for the 6-max program, Gordon, with his student IronBPC:
And these are all the tools you will ever need to practice equity. These are simple exercises, and anybody can do them – but the point its, not everybody is doing them. Again, we come back to the point that there is no big secret to success, there’s just a lot of the little things done right and consistently, which will take you where you want to be. The trick is to know what to focus on, and then – to just fucking do it! – like one of the BPC commandments goes.
