Poker glossary

Equity is the percentage of the pot a hand would win if the cards were run to showdown right now, counting a split pot as half a win. It is calculated as your win percentage plus half your tie percentage.

Equity realisation is the share of a hand's raw all-in equity that is actually won once betting, folding, and position are accounted for, rather than assuming every hand reaches showdown.

Expected value, or EV, is the average amount a decision wins or loses if it were repeated many times, found by weighting each possible outcome by how often it happens.

Fold equity is the value a bet or raise gains from the chance your opponent folds, letting you win the pot immediately without needing the best hand.

Implied odds are the extra money you expect to win on later streets when a drawing hand completes, added to the pot already in play when deciding whether a call is profitable.

Pot odds are the price of calling a bet, expressed as the size of your call against the pot once that call is in. They convert that price into the minimum equity a hand needs for the call to show a profit.

Exploitative play is a poker strategy that deliberately departs from game theory optimal play to target a specific, observed tendency in an opponent, trading some balance for extra expected value.

GTO (game theory optimal) is the poker strategy that cannot be beaten in the long run, no matter how an opponent adjusts, because it is balanced against every possible counter.

A mixed strategy is a poker strategy that plays more than one action with the same hand across different instances of a spot, in a ratio chosen to keep the range balanced and unreadable.

A Nash equilibrium in poker is a pair of strategies where neither player can improve their result by unilaterally changing their own play while the other strategy stays fixed.

Node-locking is the process of fixing the strategy of one player at a chosen decision point in a solver, then re-solving so it computes the best possible exploit against that fixed strategy.

A solver is software that computes the game theory optimal strategy for a poker spot by searching a game tree of ranges, bet sizes, and streets until no player can profitably deviate.

A blocker is a card in your hand that reduces the number of combinations of a specific hand your opponent can hold, most often the hands that would call or beat you.

Combinatorics, or combo counting, is the practice of counting the exact card combinations a hand or range can have, turning a vague read into an actual number.

A linear range, also called merged or condensed, takes the best hands in a range from the top down with no bluffs, so it bets small hoping to get called by worse.

A polarised range is a betting range made up of strong value hands and bluffs with almost nothing in between, so it wants to bet for a large size.

A range is the full set of hands a player could hold in a given situation, each weighted by how likely it is, rather than one specific hand you assign them.

Range advantage is whose entire range of possible hands is stronger against a given board, measured across every hand a player could hold rather than the one they are actually holding.

A check-raise is checking with the intention of raising once your opponent bets, letting the out-of-position player seize back the betting initiative instead of only calling or folding.

A continuation bet, or c-bet, is a bet made by the player who was the aggressor on the previous street, continuing their pressure into a new street such as the flop after a preflop raise.

A donk bet is a lead bet into the player who was the aggressor on the previous street, instead of checking to let them bet first, and it is uncommon outside boards that clearly favour the caller's range.

A double barrel is a second bet on the turn from the same player who bet the flop, continuing the aggression after their continuation bet was called.

An overbet is any bet larger than the pot in front of it, most common on the turn or river with a polarised range or a clear nut advantage.

A semi-bluff is a bet or raise with a hand that is probably behind right now but has real outs to improve into the best hand later, most often a flush draw or open-ended straight draw.

A 3-bet pot is a preflop pot where the initial raise was re-raised before the flop, leaving both ranges tighter and more polarised than in a single-raised pot.

Alpha is the fraction of the time a bluff must work to break even, calculated as bet divided by bet plus pot. It is the complement of the defender's minimum defence frequency.

Board texture describes how connected and draw-heavy a flop, turn, or river is, ranging from dry boards that support few draws to wet boards where many hands can improve.

ICM, the Independent Chip Model, converts a tournament chip stack into an estimate of real money equity using the prize pool and every stack still left in the field.

Minimum defence frequency is the share of your range you must continue with against a bet so that a bluff with any two cards cannot automatically profit. It is calculated as pot divided by pot plus bet.

Position is your seat at the table relative to the dealer button, which fixes the order everyone acts in every betting round after the preflop deal. Acting later is an advantage because you get to see your opponents act before you decide.

Stack-to-pot ratio (SPR) is the effective stack divided by the pot at the start of a street, and it measures how much room is left to bet relative to the money already in the middle.