OAK: EV & RAKE

If you are new to EV in poker, start by watching this video:

Next, watch this video where we expand the concept a bit:

Great! Now you are ready to download my advanced EV spreadsheet. Just click the following button:

To make sense of this, let’s do a quick example together. There are other ways to use this spreadsheet (for doing MW all-ins, preflop all-ins, calling postflop shoves, etc.) – but in this hand we’ll explore shoving in a small SPR pot with Ace-high.

Say you get to this flop and the SB checks to you:

We can open up the spreadsheet that you just downloaded and go to the “Shoving Preflop EV” sheet. I know we aren’t technically shoving preflop, but the formula is the same.

We can add in the following information:

• C3: The pot is $345 before shoving
• C4: There is no bet in front of us, so we enter $0
• C5: We are shoving for $425 effective
• C6: We assume the SB will call our shove with: 77+,KdQd,KdJd,QdJd,JdTd,8d7d which gives us 28% equity
• C7: We assume that the SB will fold about 50% of the time (with hands like Ace-high, KQ (minus KdQd), etc.)

Now we see the EV is +$127. Looks like a good shove to me!

BUT WHAT ABOUT RAKE?!?!?!

This entire calculation ignores rake. But if you want to get ultra-specific and see the pure EV with rake factored in, you can do the following:

1. Select the D9 cell
2. Update the formula
3. Directly after C4, add in “-X” (without the quotes), where X is the amount of rake if villain calls

So if this hand were from live $2/$5 and the if villain calls our shove the rake gets maxed at $5, we would enter “-5” (again, without quotation marks) after C4.

For giggles, try it out and see what the overall effect on the EV is.

If you want to be even more specific, assuming that rake wasn’t factored in the current pot size* of $345, you can add “-Y” (again, without quotes) after the first C3 in the formula with the current rake. This is especially useful if there are different rake charges at the different pot levels (e.g. you shove and V folds, the rake is X…and if you shove and get called, the rake is Y – where X<Y).

That completes this quick lesson. Get out there, calculate the EV for some of your hands, and let me know if you find anything cool =)

Happy exploring!