Hi,

I have been asking myself for some time now why on every equity calculator on the market it seem impossible to have a detailed view of range equity.

for instance if I use equilab and compute equity for range 1 against range 2 , I would get almost instantly the average equity.
Same for propokertools, pokerstove etc.

But why isn't it possible to have a view of each hand equity against the other player entire range ?

I know that I can compute it separately but wouldn't it be nice to have the option directly ?

i've always thought that the software was computing it anyway in order to give the average value for the entire range. So why not display the data , or a graph to see the distribution of equity instead of just the average ?

Do they really compute it that way or is there some kind of abstraction I am not aware of ?

I would be glad if you can put some light on this

Those programs work by enumerating every possible matchup and simply adding up the wins and losses for equity. There isn't a way to calculate it using math, you have to actually match up the hands. For large ranges it may take a long time and so they can take a shortcut called Monte Carlo which is a random sample that gets closer and closer to the answer.

Also, I think these websites have pre-calculated all of the heads-up hand vs hand equities, so that they are able to near-instantaneously derive heads-up range vs range equities.

Various (advanced) tools can do this. They can also calculate how much equity your hand will have vs a specific range on each and every turn or river card. If you want that kind of functionality, you need to pay for it. (I don't know of any free tools that are quite that powerful).

shameless plug: our (free) EQUITY module does this (have a look at the heatmap) :-)

I think griff1th is referring to Omni poker lab. A (paid-for) alternative is Power Equilab. That can produce heat maps like this:


Other tools are available. See the Commercial Software forum.

oh right, I should probably have included a link: https://omni.poker

The raw equity that is computed is just the summation of all your hand combos say in your range (using a hand vs range to find raw equity for each hand combo) vs the summation of all hand combos in villain's range (same thing).

correct me if i'm wrong anyone.

Not exactly. The equity is always (wins + 1/2 ties) / (all possible outcomes). The only way to determine this is to check every individual hand-vs-hand matchup one at a time and count the wins/ties/losses for that matchup and then the next one, etc. Nothing would be gained by breaking the solution down into subsets (hand v range), and in the case of a monte carlo estimation this would just make it a lot less accurate. So they don't work that way.

Fast solvers will store all hand vs hand equities in a table to speed the enumeration up, but they still work by brute force.