Your hand & board Texas Hold'em
Your equity
Pick suit, then rank · used cards are greyed out
Using the poker odds calculator
Click an empty slot, then click a card. That’s it. The calculator jumps to the next slot on its own, so for a hand and a flop you’re looking at five clicks.
Faster still: type the hand into the box at the bottom. AsKs QsJh4s gives you ace-king of spades on a queen-jack-four flop. Hand first, board after. Ten is T, or just type 10.
A few things people miss:
- Opponents are random by default. If you’ve put someone on a hand (or they showed you), click their slots and give them real cards. Equity changes a lot when the villain isn’t a random hand.
- Dead cards are for cards you saw. A player flashed a card when folding? Put it in. It comes out of the deck and out of your outs.
- Click a card to take it back. No undo button needed.
One hand, start to finish
A♠ K♠, two players left behind you, flop Q♠ J♥ 4♠. Someone folded the 9♠ face up.
Right now you have nothing. Ace high. But look at what can come:
- Any spade gives you the nut flush. There were nine left, minus the 9♠ on the floor: 8.
- Any ten gives you broadway. The T♠ is already counted, so 3 more.
11 outs. The calculator shows 23.9% to hit on the turn and 42.5% by the river. Then there are the aces and kings, which pair you up and sometimes win anyway. Add those in and you’re around 62% against two random hands. Ace high, favourite. Fun, isn’t it?
Now say the pot is $100 and you face a $50 bet. You need 33.3% to call. You have almost double that. This isn’t close.
The maths, if you want it
Outs
An out is a card that turns your hand into a winner. Easy to say, harder to count honestly. A ten that completes your straight is an out. A card that pairs your king is half an out at best, because the other player might already have a queen. We count those separately so the big number isn’t lying to you.
Rule of 2 and 4
Every poker player learns this one. On the flop, outs × 4 is roughly your chance by the river. On the turn, outs × 2 for the river card.
It works, mostly. Up to about eight outs it’s within a point. Past that it gets generous: 15 outs gives you “60%” when the real number is 54%. If you’re stacking off with a monster draw, that 6% matters.
The real formula
After the flop you can see five cards, so 47 are left.
Turn: outs ÷ 47 By the river: 1 − (47 − outs)/47 × (46 − outs)/46
Flush draw, 9 outs: 1 − 38/47 × 37/46 = 35.0%. Notice you’re calculating the chance of missing twice and flipping it. Much easier than adding up all the ways to hit.
Counting hands
1,326. That’s every two-card hand you can be dealt. A pocket pair comes 6 ways (four aces, pick two). Something like ace-king comes 16 ways, and only 4 of them are suited. So when you think “he could have AK suited here”, remember it’s a quarter of his AK combos, not half.
How we get the equity number
If the number of possible deals is small enough, the calculator just goes through every single one. On the turn against one opponent that’s under fifty thousand, which takes a blink. Preflop against three random hands it’s billions, so instead we deal 100,000 random boards and count. The result moves by maybe ±0.3% if you run it again. The line under the result tells you which method was used.
Pot odds and EV
The question is never “will I hit?”. It’s “am I being paid enough to try?”.
Equity you need = call ÷ (pot + call) EV of the call = equity × (pot + call) − call
Type the pot (with the bet already in it) and the amount you have to call. Say $100 and $50: you need 33.3%. If your equity is 40%, the call earns 0.40 × 150 − 50 = $10 on average. Not every time. On average, over a lot of hands.
One honest caveat. This only looks at the money in the pot now. If you hit your flush and can get another bet out of them, you can call with a bit less than the formula says. That’s implied odds, and no calculator knows how stubborn your opponent is.
Draw cheat sheet
| You have (on the flop) | Outs | Turn | By river | Rule of 4 says |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pocket pair, hoping for a set | 2 | 4.3% | 8.4% | 8% |
| Gutshot | 4 | 8.5% | 16.5% | 16% |
| Two overcards | 6 | 12.8% | 24.1% | 24% |
| Open-ended straight draw | 8 | 17.0% | 31.5% | 32% |
| Flush draw | 9 | 19.1% | 35.0% | 36% |
| Flush draw + gutshot | 12 | 25.5% | 45.0% | 48% |
| Flush draw + open-ender | 15 | 31.9% | 54.1% | 60% |
That last row is the one to remember. A big combo draw is a favourite over most one-pair hands. Shoving with it isn’t a bluff.
Classic all-ins before the flop
Heads-up, all the money in preflop, every board counted.
| Hands | Win | Tie | Lose |
|---|---|---|---|
| A♥A♠ vs K♦K♣ | 81.1% | 0.4% | 18.6% |
| A♠K♣ vs A♦Q♥ | 71.7% | 4.6% | 23.7% |
| 8♥8♦ vs A♠K♣ | 55.4% | 0.3% | 44.3% |
| A♥K♦ vs 2♣2♠ | 46.7% | 0.6% | 52.7% |
| A♠K♠ vs Q♥Q♦ | 46.0% | 0.4% | 53.6% |
| A♥K♦ vs Q♠Q♣ | 42.7% | 0.3% | 57.0% |
| J♥10♥ vs A♠K♦ | 41.0% | 0.4% | 58.6% |
“Coin flip” is a bit of a myth, by the way. Pair against two overcards is closer to 55/45, and even deuces are a small favourite over AK. Suits shift these by about a point either way, so plug in your exact hand if it matters.
Odds tell you what happens over thousands of hands, not the next one. Keep it fun, keep it to money you can lose. If it stops being fun, BeGambleAware.org can help.