Tournament equity

Published on May 6, 2010 by Ladbrokes_Poker   ·   No Comments

Many amateur players, and indeed some experienced live poker players will have you believe that they only mathematics you need to know to win at poker is how to calculate pot odds and the probability of a specific hand arriving as the next card, but you also need to be aware of tournament equity as it has a massive effect on your play and your potential for profit.

Poker Tips suggest that tournament equity is essentially your rightful share to the prizepool. For example, if ten people entered a sit and go that had a buy-in of $100 it would be reasonable to assume that each of the ten players’ tournament equity would be exactly $100, which is the entire prizepool of $1,000 divided by the number of players, ten, taking part.

However, nobody knows their exact equity when starting any sort of poker tournament as it can vary greatly. If you are seated with some complete novice players then your equity would be much more than $10 but if you found yourself sitting with a table full of winning professional players that your equity could indeed be less than the $10 in the example.

Your equity in a tournament can also increase or decrease as the tournament progresses, usually as you or one of your opponents gains or loses chips or when they are eliminated.  If you were playing in the same $100 sit and go as in the previous example, where your equity at the start was $100 and someone was eliminated on the first hand, the winner of the all-in hand would receive around $90 extra equity and the remaining $10 from the eliminated player would be shared amongst the other players at the table, taking your equity to $102 without even playing a hand.

Now imagine, n this overly simplified example, that the same player eliminates the next three players over the course of three hands, if this were to happen your equity in the tournament would increase to $114 and by the time half the field was eliminated you would have increased your tournament equity to $150 without even risking a single chip!

This is one of the reasons why when new players ask how to play sit and go poker they are always told to play tight early in the match because they are gaining equity all the time as weaker players make moves with poor starting hands and lose chips and their entire stacks.

Tournament equity is also the cornerstone of Independent Chip Modelling (ICM) which is a complicated process of finding out the probability of a player finishing in a particular place, assigning their equity to them and then you can work out if making an all-in shove or calling an all-in bet is actually a play with positive expectation.

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