OTB #058: The Power of Equity & Nut Advantage

You may have heard the terms "equity", "equity realisation", "range advantage" and "nut advantage", but not been 100% sure what they mean and why they're important.

Today I'm going to explain what these terms mean and how you can use them to build a postflop strategy you can actually implement.

Let's dive in...

What is equity?

Equity is how often a player will win a hand, expressed as a percentage, assuming all players go to showdown.

It can be calculated in many ways:

Hand vs hand

If you wanted to see how often a specific hand would win against another specific hand, you could do this equity calculation.

In practice, this kind of calculation isn't that useful because you're not Daniel Negreanu and so you don't know the exact hand you're up against.

Instead, you'll be up against a range...

Hand vs range

If your opponent (MP2) jammed and you wanted to see if you had enough equity against that range with your specific hand, this equity calculation would be useful.

Let's say you know you needed 46% equity to call - 77 has over 48% equity so it would be a profitable call.

Range vs range

You can also calculate how much equity your range (MP3) has against your opponent's range (MP2).

But all of these assume that the hand goes to showdown and we know that not all hands go to showdown.

This is where equity realisation comes in...

Equity rea-what now?

The chance of your hand winning is affected by something called equity realisation.

This is the ability of a hand to realise its raw equity, but there are also other things that affect your ability to realise equity like:

• Your skill level relative to your opponent(s)

• Your position

A very strong, aggressive opponent is going to make life tough for you postflop.

A weaker, more passive opponent is more likely to let you see turns and rivers and so you'll be more able to realise your equity.

Some hands do better than others at realising equity, e.g. suited hands are better than off suited hands.

Pocket pairs often over-realise their equity because they make more than their pot share when they hit a set. K2o has really poor equity realisation.

And then finally it's easier to realise equity in position because you get to act last on each postflop street.

So what's range advantage?

If I raise from the BTN at 30bb effective and you just call in the Big Blind, I will have a range advantage on AKQ because my range is a lot stronger than yours.

You're missing a lot of the top of the range that interacts with that board because you would have 3-bet those hands preflop and you defend a really wide range that completely whiffs that flop a lot of the time.

While people use the "range advantage" a lot, I like to think in terms of equity advantage and nut advantage instead.

I want to know who has more equity and who has a higher proportion of strong hands.

What is equity advantage?

Equity advantage goes to the player who has more equity at that specific moment in the hand.

Here's an example...

30bb BTN vs BB on As 4s 2d (flop)

The BTN has the equity advantage here - 58% vs 42%.

Turn 8h after flop bet/call

The BTN still has the equity advantage, but it's getting a lot closer together because the Big Blind has folded a lot of garbage hands to the flop c-bet.

River 8s after turn bet/call

Now the Big Blind has the equity advantage because their overall range is a lot stronger.

The Button has essentially filtered out all the bad hands from the Big Blind's range while keeping some weaker hands in their own range, hence the advantage now in the Big Blind's shoes on this specific runout.

What is nut advantage?

Nut advantage goes to the player who has a higher proportion of nutted (i.e. very strong) hands.

On an A K 8 rainbow board, the Button has a huge equity advantage (68.8%) and a higher proportion of very strong hands:

45% of the Button's range is "Best hands" versus 4.5% for the Big Blind.

On a 765fd board instead, the equities run a lot closer together.

The Button now only has a very slight equity advantage at 50.1%, but now it's the Big Blind who has the nut advantage as they have a higher proportion of very strong hands.

So how do equity and nut advantage guide our strategy?

Let's keep things simple and continue the 30bb BTN vs BB focus.

There are going to be some flops that are great for the BTN and some that are not so great.

You can use aggregate reports to help you see how much equity you have and what that means for your strategy.

The diagram below shows the best boards for in position from all 1,755 strategically different flops sorted by the highest equity.

As you can see, you c-bet almost all the time apart from one board... AKK.

If you sort the sheet by lowest equity instead, you can see that there is now a lot of checking:

If we filter by paired boards and sort by highest frequency total bet, you can see a pattern that when the pair is the top card you should bet a lot, and you might think this is because you have an equity advantage:

But if we stay with paired boards and sort by highest frequency check, you can see that we do a lot of checking when the pair is the bottom card, even though we still have about 60% equity:

The Big Blind now has a higher proportion of very strong hands - think about all the trips they can have - and therefore has a nut advantage.

As the in position player, even though you have an equity advantage, you have to check a lot on the flop because your opponent can have so many strong hands and if you bet and get raised, which should happen quite frequently, you are in a tough spot if you've bet a lot of your range.

The Big Blind can leverage the fact that they have so many strong hands by raising a lot of bluffs as well.

So generally speaking, the more equity your range has, the more you should bet.

The less equity your range has, the less you should bet.

But when you're at a nut disadvantage, you can't just start blasting.

And that's the beauty of aggregate reports - you can quickly find big picture, overarching strategies.

And that's why I recently added this new module to my Train & Play Like The Pros programme where I walk you through how to learn, study and train any heads up postflop spot.

Summary

Equity is how often a player will win a hand, expressed as a percentage, assuming all players go to showdown.

But it's affected by equity realisation, which is the ability of a hand to realise its raw equity.

Equity advantage goes to the player who has more equity at that specific moment in the hand, while nut advantage goes to the player who has the higher proportion of nutted hands.

And you can use all of this to help you build out a flop strategy that you can actually implement in game.

This week's action tip: Practise using software programs like Equilab or Flopzilla to see who has the equity and nut advantage on different boards.

That's it for this week.

See you next time.