How to Use the PLO Equity Calculator

Quick start (30 seconds)

1. Open the calculator.
2. Click the first empty slot next to Player 1. A card picker opens.
3. Click four cards in the picker to fill Player 1's hand. The picker closes after each pick — just reopen it for the next slot.
4. Repeat for Player 2. As soon as both players have four cards each, the results panel at the bottom fills in.
5. Add a flop, turn, or river with the board slots to see how equity shifts on different boards.

That's the whole tool. The rest of this page explains what each part is for, how to read the results, and some worked examples.

Entering hands

Every player slot has four card placeholders. A PLO hand is always exactly four cards, and you have to fill all four before the calculator will run that player's equity. Clicking an empty slot opens a card picker showing all 52 cards, organized by suit. Cards that are already in use elsewhere (other hands, the board, or the dead-cards row) are dimmed and cannot be picked twice.

To replace a card, click the card you want to change — the picker reopens with a Clear card option if you just want to remove it without replacing. To remove an entire player, click the × in the top-right corner of their slot. You need at least two players at all times, so the × is hidden when you only have two.

To add more players, click + Add player below the grid. You can have up to six players.

Entering the board

The five board slots correspond to Flop 1, Flop 2, Flop 3, Turn, and River. Fill them in the order you'd normally see them (flop → turn → river), but technically you can fill any slot in any order — the calculator only cares about which cards are visible, not the order they came.

You have to fill the board in valid PLO steps: 0 cards (preflop), 3 cards (flop), 4 cards (turn), or 5 cards (river). If you've only filled 1 or 2 board slots, the calculator waits until you either complete the flop or clear back to preflop.

Dead cards

The Dead cardsrow at the bottom is for cards you know are out of the deck but that aren't part of any hand or the board. Typical use cases:

• Cards that were folded face-up in a live game.
• Cards you saw on another table or in a side scenario you're trying to isolate.
• What ifanalysis: “how much does my equity shift if I remove the four aces from the deck?”

Dead cards are excluded from every runout, both in Monte Carlo and exact mode. Click a dead card to remove it.

Reading the results

When at least two players have complete hands, the results panel shows three numbers per player:

• Equity— the big percentage. This is the share of the pot you'd win on average if the hand ran out from the current street. A player with 63% equity wins 63¢ of every dollar in the pot over the long run.
• Win % — how often this player wins the pot outright, with no ties.
• Tie % — how often this player chops with at least one other player.

Equity equals Win % + (Tie % ÷ number of players in the tie). In most heads-up spots ties are negligible, but in multi-way pots with board-heavy boards (for example, when everyone has to play the board) the tie percentage can matter. The equity numbers always sum to 100% across all players.

Hand-type frequencies

Below the equity bars, each player gets a horizontal ribbon showing how often they end up with each kind of made hand across all simulated runouts — straight flush, quads, full house, flush, straight, trips, two pair, one pair, high card. Hover over any segment to see the exact percentage, and a per-player list on the right shows the top three most-frequent categories. A running readout just below the ribbons shows whatever you're hovering so you don't have to squint at tiny tooltips.

This is one of the features that separates PLO players who know their hands from players who don't. A hand with 60% equity that makes a flush 20% of the time plays very differently than a hand with 60% equity that's mostly two pair — one is a draw-heavy polarized hand, the other is a made-hand-heavy value hand. The ribbons make that texture visible at a glance.

Next-card equity grid

Whenever the board has three or four cards (flop or turn), a 13×4 grid of every card in the deckappears below the hand-type ribbons. Each cell is a card; cards already in use (hole cards, the board, dead cards) are dimmed, and the remaining cards are colored by what that card would do to the focal player's equity if it came next.

• On the turn— each cell is the river card. Green means the focal player wins outright, amber means they tie, red means they lose. The summary underneath shows the out count at a glance: “14 win, 2 tie, 28 loss.” This is the fastest way to read outs in a spot that would otherwise take a minute of counting.
• On the flop— each cell is the turn card. Because there's still a river to come, the value is a continuous equity, so colors are a gradient: strong green for cards that lift your equity most, amber for neutral, red for cards that drop you.

If more than one player is in the hand, the P1 / P2 / P3 …toggle in the top-right corner of the grid switches whose perspective you're seeing. This is especially useful in multi-way pots where you want to check “which cards are good for me vs. which cards are good for them.” Hover any cell to see the exact per-player equity for that card below the grid.

The grid is computed automatically as part of every flop and turn calculation — no second round-trip, no extra button to click. For heads-up spots it takes under 10 ms; for 6-way spots it takes under a quarter of a second.

Exact, Monte Carlo, or Auto?

The three-button toggle above the hands grid controls how the calculation runs:

• Auto (the default) — the calculator picks the best method for your spot. If the number of possible runouts is small enough, it enumerates every single one for a deterministic answer. If not, it falls back to Monte Carlo. This is what you want 95% of the time.
• MC (Monte Carlo) — forces the calculator to sample 100,000 random runouts regardless. This is faster than exact mode for large runout spaces and accurate to about ±0.15%. Useful when you want a quick answer on a multi-way preflop spot.
• Exact — forces enumeration of every possible runout, even in spots where that would take a few seconds. The result is deterministic: running the same spot twice always gives the same answer. Useful when you want to quote a specific equity number in an article or tournament review without any statistical wiggle.

The Exactbutton is disabled when the board is already complete (river) — there's nothing left to enumerate, so Auto is already exact by definition.

Rough timing on a modern laptop:

• Flop, turn, or river equity: basically instant (<100 ms)
• Heads-up preflop exact: 3–5 seconds
• 100,000-sample Monte Carlo (any spot): under a second
• 4-to-6-way preflop exact: too slow, use MC instead

Shareable URLs

Every card you add or remove updates the URL in your browser bar. That means the entire state of the calculator — hands, board, dead cards — is encoded in the link. Copy the URL (or click the Share button to copy it automatically) and paste it anywhere: a forum post, a Discord chat, an article, a text message to your study buddy. Anyone who opens it sees exactly the same spot with identical results.

The URL format is ?p=hand1|hand2&b=boardCards&d=deadCards. Each card is two characters: rank (2–9, T, J, Q, K, A) followed by suit (s, h, d, c). For example, AhAdKsKh is AA with an offsuit king-king.

PLO variants (PLO4, PLO5, PLO6)

The PLO4 / PLO5 / PLO6 toggle in the top-left of the controls row switches the variant. The rules stay the same (exactly two cards from your hand and three from the board) — the only thing that changes is how many hole cards each player gets. The hand slots grow from four to five or six cards automatically.

Both 5-card and 6-card PLO are also hosted at dedicated landing pages for convenience:

• 5-card PLO equity calculator
• 6-card PLO equity calculator

Equities in 5-card and 6-card PLO run noticeably closer than in standard PLO because the extra hole cards give every hand more ways to reach the board. AAKK double-suited, which is about 67% against a random hand in PLO4, drops to roughly 57% in PLO5 and 54% in PLO6.

Ranges (beta)

Each player slot has a small Hand / Range toggle. Switching it to Range replaces the four card pickers with a dropdown of curated preset ranges. When at least one slot is set to a range, the calculator runs Monte Carlo sampling with a random representative hand drawn from each range on every iteration, and reports the average equity across the samples.

The available presets in this release:

• Any random hand— uniform across all 270,725 possible 4-card combos. The classic “hero vs villain” baseline.
• AAxx / KKxx — any hand containing at least a pair of aces or kings.
• QQ+ — any hand containing a pair of queens, kings, or aces. A common three-bet range.
• Premium double-suited — double-suited AA/KK/QQ combinations. The tightest realistic squeeze range.
• Broadway rundowns — connected T-through-A hands (T-J-Q-K-ish shapes).
• Mid rundowns (7–T) — connected middle-card hands (8-7-6-5 through 9-8-7-6).

Range mode is a deliberately-scoped MVP. It supports PLO4 only (PLO5 and PLO6 range sampling is harder because the combo counts explode), and uses Monte Carlo exclusively — there's no “exact” mode when ranges are active because the combinatorics aren't tractable. A full text-based range parser (PPT-style syntax), multi-way range vs range, and additional position-specific presets are on the roadmap.

Equity trainer

A separate quiz tool at /tools/equity-trainer uses the same engine to test your intuition. It shows you a random PLO spot — two hands, sometimes with a flop or turn — and asks you to guess which of six equity buckets Player 1 falls into (below 25%, 25–40%, 40–50%, 50–60%, 60–75%, above 75%). Exact bucket earns 10 points, one bucket off earns 5, two buckets off earns 2. Streaks, accuracy, and score update live. When you miss a spot, the Open this spot in the calculator button takes you to the same spot pre-loaded in the full calculator so you can see why your guess was wrong.

Embedding the calculator

Appending ?embed=1 to any calculator URL hides the site header and footer, giving you a clean standalone view suitable for iframing in blog posts, forum replies, or Discord tabs. You can combine it with a pre-filled spot:

<iframe
  src="https://plo.com/tools/equity-calculator?p=AhAdKsKh|JhTh8s7s&embed=1"
  width="100%"
  height="800"
  style="border: 0"
/>

4-color deck

The 4-color deck toggle at the top of the controls row switches between the traditional 2-color deck (spades and clubs are black, hearts and diamonds are red) and a 4-color deck (spades black, hearts red, diamonds blue, clubs green). Many online poker rooms ship with the 4-color deck enabled because it makes flush draws much easier to read at a glance. Your preference is saved in your browser and persists between sessions.

Example scenarios

The links below open the calculator pre-filled with a specific spot. Use them to sanity-check that you're reading the output right, or just as a starting point to modify for your own analysis. For a larger collection of curated PLO matchups, see the PLO Spot Library.

Frequently asked questions

Is the calculator free?

Yes. No signup, no account, no paywall, no ads. Every calculation runs locally in your browser — we don't see your hands, we don't log them, and you can use it offline after the first page load.

Why am I only getting 60% with AAKK against a random hand?

Because Pot-Limit Omaha is much closer than Hold'em. In No-Limit Hold'em, AA is about 85% against a random hand preflop. In PLO, the best possible starting hand (AAKK double-suited) is only about 66–67% against a random four-card holding, because PLO forces you to use exactly two cards from your hand and exactly three from the board. That constraint dramatically limits how much a premium pair can dominate — there are always enough ways for a random hand to outdraw you that the equity gap stays narrow. This is the single biggest difference between PLO and Hold'em, and it's worth sitting with for a minute before you go further.

Can I enter a range instead of specific hands?

Not in the current version. Version 1 of the calculator supports exact hand vs. exact hand only. Range vs. range (and range vs. hand) is on the roadmap for a future release. PLO range UX is notoriously hard because there are over 270,000 distinct four-card starting combinations, so this one is a bigger project than it sounds.

Does it support PLO5 or PLO6?

Not yet — PLO4 only for now. Support for 5-card and 6-card Pot-Limit Omaha is planned for a later version.

Is the result exact or approximate?

It depends on the mode. In Auto mode for any spot where the board has at least three visible cards (flop, turn, or river) and for heads-up preflop, the result is exact — the calculator enumerates every possible runout. For preflop spots with three or more players, Auto falls back to Monte Carlo with 100,000 samples, which is accurate to roughly ±0.15% at the 95% confidence level. If you need a deterministic number, flip the mode toggle to Exact.

Why is my heads-up preflop calculation taking several seconds?

Exact heads-up preflop enumerates all 1,086,008 possible board runouts, and that takes 3–5 seconds on a modern laptop even with a fast evaluator. A progress bar shows how far along the calculation is. If you don't need an exact answer, switching the mode toggle to MC gives you a nearly-identical answer in under a second.

Does the calculator work on mobile?

Yes. The interface is designed mobile-first, with the card picker sized for touch and the results panel stacking cleanly on narrow screens. All the computation runs in a background thread, so the UI stays responsive even during long calculations.

Can I use this offline?

Yes, once you've loaded the page. The calculator is a static page plus a Web Worker that runs the math locally — no server round-trips are required for any calculation. You will lose the ability to load new scenarios from URLs if you completely disconnect, but any scenario you're actively working on continues to work.

Why does my shared link not look the same when I reopen it?

Usually because the URL got truncated by whatever platform you shared it through (some chat apps aggressively shorten links, some strip query parameters entirely). Try using the Share button to copy the full URL, and paste it as a direct link rather than relying on auto-detection. If the URL starts with /tools/equity-calculator?p=, it's intact.

Does the equity include rake?

No. Equity is the raw share of the pot. To convert to dollar expectation, multiply your equity by the total pot, then subtract your share of any rake taken.

Why doesn't the next-card grid show up on preflop?

The grid visualizes “what happens when the next board card comes,” which is the turn on a flop spot and the river on a turn spot. Preflop, the “next card” is just the first card of the flop — and evaluating equity conditional on a single flop card is basically meaningless (the flop is a combination of three cards, not one). River spots have nothing left to come. Both hide the grid automatically.

Can I use ranges?

Yes — each player slot has a Hand / Rangetoggle. Switching it to Range replaces the card pickers with a dropdown of preset ranges (random, AAxx, KKxx, QQ+, premium double-suited, broadway rundowns, mid rundowns). When at least one slot is a range, the calculator samples representative hands and reports average equity. Range mode is PLO4 only in this release. See the “Ranges” section above for details.

How do PLO5 and PLO6 work?

Use the PLO4 / PLO5 / PLO6 toggle in the top-left of the controls row. The PLO rule is unchanged — exactly two cards from your hand and three from the board — but each player gets five or six hole cards instead of four. The extra cards bring equities closer across the board and make every hand richer in draws. There are also dedicated landing pages at /tools/plo5-equity-calculator and /tools/plo6-equity-calculator.

Is the next-card grid exact or a sample?

Always exact. On turn spots, it evaluates a single river card per cell. On flop spots, it enumerates every possible river for every possible turn card — so the displayed number is the exact per-turn equity, not a Monte Carlo estimate. The computation is cheap enough that we just always do it.

A reminder on PLO hand rules

The calculator enforces the core PLO rule: you must play exactly two cards from your hand and exactly three from the board. This trips up players coming from Hold'em for the first time, where any combination of your hole cards and the board works. A few consequences that matter:

• Four-of-a-kind on the board doesn't play. If the board is 7♠ 7♥ 7♦ 7♣ K, you cannot make quad sevens unless you also hold a seven in your hand — and you can only play one of the board sevens with your two hole cards, giving you trips at best.
• You can't play four of a flush from your hand. If you hold A♥ K♥ Q♥ J♥ and the board is all low-heart cards, you still only play two of your hearts — the best you can make is a flush using your two highest remaining hearts plus three from the board.
• You can't play the board. If the board shows a straight flush and you have no cards that participate, you still have to contribute exactly two cards, which means you make a worse hand than the board shows.

The calculator handles all of this automatically. If you see a result that seems wrong, it's almost always because the PLO constraint means your hand is weaker than a Hold'em reflex would suggest.

Ready to use it?