What Is Your Poker Equity?
Most poker onlineplayers are familiar with the term equity, but few people know how this term can be applied in a poker context. Your poker online equity is your share of the pot that you can expect to receive. Obviously you can never expect to win a pot because there is no way of knowing what the other players’ have, but pot equity is useful tool in calculating your odds. Most poker guidebooks will represent pot equity as a percentage or a probability. Now the thing about pot equity is that you can also have negative pot equity. If you can look at the odds, and see that you have very little chance of taking the pot, but contribute anyway, you have negative equity. Negative equity is when you have negative, or no, expected share in the pot. Negative equity is a very bad situation, which you should avoid at all costs.
In very rare situations, you could expect to get a return from the pot, even if you have negative equity. This situation tends to only occur when there are just two poker players left in the game, because the pot has to go to one or the other of the players. Because this is the situation, a player could have a negative expected share of the pot, but the tides could easily change with a lucky deal.
