Pick your two cards and, if you like, the board. The calculator deals out the rest tens of thousands of times and shows how often you win, split and lose.
Choose your two hole cards, add up to five board cards and set the number of opponents from one to eight. The calculator plays out the missing cards 25,000–60,000 times on the engine that deals at our tables and shows how often you win, split and lose — and which hand you finish with.
Everything runs in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere. The opponents hold random cards, which is exactly your situation before anyone has shown a thing.
The tool opens with A♠ K♠ already in your hand, a favourite example of ours: against one opponent it wins about two hands in three, against eight it is close to one in five. Press “Clear” to start from scratch.
It uses the Monte Carlo method. In each simulated deal the calculator shuffles the cards nobody has seen, gives every opponent two of them and completes the board. Then it scores every seven-card hand with the same evaluator our server uses at the showdown. You win the deal if your score is the highest, split if it ties for the highest, and lose otherwise.
It runs 60,000 deals against one or two opponents, 40,000 against three to five and 25,000 against six to eight, in small batches so the page never freezes. With 60,000 deals a result near 50% carries a standard error of about 0.2 percentage points, so two runs rarely differ by more than a few tenths.
Why not count every possibility? Before the flop against one unknown hand that would mean 1,225 possible opponent hands times 1,712,304 boards — about 2.1 billion showdowns, far too many for a phone. For the hand-against-hand examples below we did count every board, in a script on the same engine.
Each line below is an all-in with both hands face up. Our script went through every possible board — 1,712,304 before the flop, 990 on the flop — so these numbers have no random error at all. Equity is the win share plus half of the splits.
| Matchup | Board | Win | Split | Equity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A♠ A♥ vs K♣ K♦ | — | 81.1% / 18.6% | 0.4% | 81.3% / 18.7% |
| A♠ K♥ vs Q♣ Q♦ | — | 42.7% / 57.0% | 0.3% | 42.8% / 57.2% |
| A♠ K♠ vs Q♣ Q♦ | — | 46.0% / 53.6% | 0.4% | 46.2% / 53.8% |
| A♠ K♦ vs 2♣ 2♥ | — | 46.7% / 52.8% | 0.6% | 47.0% / 53.0% |
| A♠ K♦ vs A♥ Q♣ | — | 71.7% / 23.7% | 4.6% | 74.0% / 26.0% |
| A♠ K♦ vs J♣ 10♣ | — | 58.6% / 41.0% | 0.4% | 58.8% / 41.2% |
| 8♥ 7♥ vs A♣ K♠ | K♥ 9♥ 2♣ | 39.8% / 60.2% | 0% | 39.8% / 60.2% |
| 8♥ 7♥ vs A♣ K♠ | K♥ 9♥ 2♣ 4♦ | 20.5% / 79.5% | 0% | 20.5% / 79.5% |
| A♠ K♦ vs A♥ K♣ | — | 2.2% / 2.2% | 95.7% | 50% / 50% |
The classic cooler. Kings get there about one time in five, mostly by catching one of the two kings left in the deck. Suits move it slightly: kings that share no suit with the aces have 18.7% equity, kings that share both suits only 17.4%, because any flush they make in those suits loses to the ace of the same suit.
A♠ K♥ against Q♣ Q♦ is what players call a race. The pair is a small favourite, 57.2% to 42.8%. Make the ace-king suited and it gains 3.4 points. Even the smallest pair is ahead: 2♣ 2♥ against A♠ K♦ has 53.0%.
A♠ K♦ against A♥ Q♣ looks close and is not. The queen needs to pair without the king pairing too, and 4.6% of boards are split because both hands play the same five. Result: 26.0% for ace-queen. Now look at J♣ 10♣ against the same ace-king: a “worse” hand with two live cards and flush chances, it keeps 41.2%. Sharing a card with a stronger hand is what really hurts.
You hold 8♥ 7♥, the opponent A♣ K♠, the flop is K♥ 9♥ 2♣. Nine hearts are left, and at least one of them arrives on 360 of the 990 possible turn-and-river pairs: 1 − (36 × 35) / (45 × 44) = 36.4%. Eight of those still lose, when the other card fills the opponent up — 2♥ with K♦, for example. Another 42 runouts win without a flush: 27 straights, 6 trips and 9 two pair. That gives 394 wins out of 990, or 39.8%. Once a blank such as 4♦ falls on the turn, only the nine hearts remain: 9 out of 44 rivers, 20.5%.
Equity is not the same as winning this particular hand. With 81% you still lose one all-in in five, and that will happen to you at the table — usually at the worst moment.
Equity is your share of the pot if the hand were played out to the river many times: your wins plus your part of the splits. With 81% against kings you would collect about 81 pots’ worth out of every hundred such all-ins. It is an average, not a forecast for tonight.
For a quick sense of scale, here are some starting hands against one opponent holding two random cards. These are Monte Carlo results with 1,000,000 deals per hand, so the last digit can move by one. The full table of all 169 hands is in starting hands.
| Hand | Win | Split | Equity |
|---|---|---|---|
| A♠ A♦ | 85.0% | 0.5% | 85.2% |
| K♠ K♦ | 82.1% | 0.6% | 82.4% |
| Q♠ Q♦ | 79.6% | 0.6% | 79.9% |
| 8♠ 8♦ | 68.7% | 0.9% | 69.2% |
| A♠ K♠ | 66.2% | 1.7% | 67.0% |
| A♠ K♦ | 64.4% | 1.7% | 65.3% |
| J♠ 10♠ | 56.2% | 2.7% | 57.6% |
| 2♠ 2♦ | 49.4% | 1.9% | 50.3% |
| 7♠ 2♦ | 31.7% | 5.8% | 34.6% |
More opponents shrink every hand. Pocket aces win 73.2% of the time against two random hands, 63.6% against three, 49.0% against five and 34.4% against eight — still the best hand at the table, but far from a sure thing.
It plays 60,000 deals against one or two opponents, 40,000 against three to five and 25,000 against six to eight. Near 50% that means a standard error of 0.2–0.3 percentage points, so repeated runs differ by a few tenths at most.
Your average share of the pot if the hand were played to the river many times: wins plus your part of the splits. Against one opponent it is roughly win + split ÷ 2.
The tool answers the question you face before anything is shown: how does my hand do against unknown cards. For hand-against-hand matchups, use the exact examples on this page, counted with the same engine.
A little. Against one random hand A♠ K♠ has 67.0% equity and A♠ K♦ 65.3%; the 1.7 points come mostly from flushes.
Yes. The hand evaluator is the same code that decides showdowns at the poker tables in Anubis City, compiled for the browser.
Counting outs, the rule of 2 and 4 against exact odds, common draws and when a call pays.
Read more →All 169 hands with their equity against 1–8 opponents, the top 20 and the classic beginner mistakes.
Read more →All ten hands with real cards, exact odds, tie-break rules and a printable cheat sheet.
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Main and side pots, worked examples with three and four players, odd chips and a calculator.
Read more →When a bluff makes sense, how often it must work, semi-bluffs, sizing and online tells.
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Free debens, 15 seconds per move, and AI opponents to keep you company when the table is quiet. Start at the Scribes’ Table.
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