I credit using Flopzilla Pro for most of my poker improvement. These are the 5 things I use it for during EVERY study and coaching session.

You MUST use Flopzilla Pro, regardless of an online or LIVE poker journey (get Flopzilla Pro here). It’s incredibly useful for reviewing hands, learning equities and hand reading. The $25 you spend on Flopzilla and the free beta version of Flopzilla Pro will be the best $25 you’ve ever spent in poker.

Listen to podcast #377 as you follow along below:

But just like PokerTracker 4 and a HUD, Flopzilla is only a great tool if you learn how to use it. It’s going to take daily practice for probably weeks or months in order to gain the benefits of this tool. However, it’s absolutely worth putting in 10-15 minutes per day to learn Flopzilla.

*This episode was also released as an encore presentation for episode #408: The 5 Ways I Use Flopzilla Pro Every Day (click to download/listen) in conjunction with a full week of Flopzilla Videos on YouTube.

Learn how to use Flopzilla Pro to get the most from your study time:

Working with Flopzilla on a daily basis will develop your understanding of hand and range equities, and you’ll build an intuition for these equities. As you’re playing, your intuition will kick in and you’ll end up avoiding marginal and losing situations because you’ve seen them a million times before in your Flopzilla studies.

Here are the 4 basic uses of Flopzilla Pro and 1 expert use of it.

Use #1: Hand versus Hand Equities

At its heart, Flopzilla is an equity calculator. This means it calculates your equity, or chance of winning the hand, on any street given the parameters you enter into the program.

You can pit one hand versus another and see what the preflop equities are. In this picture, the AcAh faces off against 6c6h:

When the AA has the same suits as the 66 hand, 66 has an 18.9% chance of winning. This is calculated over millions of different flops. So, you can look at the 18.9% equity of 66 here as the chance of beating AA in the long run. Things aren’t looking too good for 66.

But remember, that this is preflop equity. The flop can change everything, especially if a 6 hits the board or if the flop is 457.

What if the 66 hand has two “live” suits:

With two “live” suits of diamonds and spades, the 66 has 20.2% equity now. Two “live” suits gives flush potential and increases 66 chance of winning against AA.

Check out video #1 in a 5-video Flopzilla Pro series on YouTube:

Use #2: Range versus Hand Equities

You enter in a range of hands and pit it against one single hand.

Example: Your opponent is open-raising from the CO and you put him on a 22% range that consists of every pocket pair, every Broadway, every suited Ace and 76s+. It’s folded to you in the BB and you consider calling. Let’s look at your equities against this range with 3 different hands: KQs, 66 and T7s.

KQs has 50.9% equity preflop versus the 22% range.

66 has about the same equity as KQs with 50.1% preflop equity. So, given millions of boards, these two hands can expect to win a little over half the time versus this range.

The T7s has a piddly 37% preflop equity versus the 22% range. Lots of players call with hands like this from the BB versus the CO. If you make this call, you’re giving your opponent a Bread & Butter situation. They’re IP against you as the preflop raiser with a mathematical advantage. T7s is not a winning, +EV call.

Use #3: Range versus Range Equities

Example #1: Your BB calling range is 22%. The CO opens at 22% and it’s folded to you:

Your 22% calling range has preflop equity against the CO of 46%, not too bad and you can justify calling with this entire range.

Example #2: Your BB calling range is 22%, but this time you’re facing an EP raising range of just 10%:

Now your preflop equity is just 38% versus this tighter 10% open-raising range. You can see through this example how the tighter a range is, the more preflop equity it has against calling ranges.

Use #4: Range and Board Interaction

When you enter any range into Flopzilla, it shows you how frequently it hits various strength hands over millions of different flops:

The 22% open-raising range from the CO hits TP+ 27.3% (just add up the %'s) and OESD & FD 7.7%. In total, this range “hits” flops 34% of the time.

How well does the smaller and stronger 10% open-raising range interact with the average flop?

The 10% open-raising range from the EP hits TP+ 35.6% and OESD & FD 5.8%. In total, this range “hits” flops 40.3%.

Flopzilla has showed us that tighter ranges hold more equity preflop because they hit the strongest hands more frequently than wider ranges do.

I demonstrate the 4 basic uses of Flopzilla Pro in this video:

Expert Use #5: Hand Reading

The #1 skill in poker is hand reading and Flopzilla is the perfect software to help you develop this skill.

Hand reading is the art of assigning your opponent a preflop range of hands based on how they entered the pot, then narrowing that range through the streets based on further actions. Hand reading is what’s going to improve your skills more than any other on your poker journey.

I’m not diving deep into hand reading right now as you're probably just starting with Flopzilla on your poker journey. But when you're ready, this is my #1 resource for hand reading instruction. It's a 3,700-word page with 3 podcast episodes, 4 videos and 4 challenges that teach you how to hand read.

Challenge

Here’s my challenge to you for this episode:  Practice with Flopzilla Pro for 10 minutes per day to improve your range and hand equity understanding. And for God’s sake, learn to hand read ASAP!!!

Now it’s your turn to take action and do something positive for your poker journey.

Support the Show

These super poker peeps are on their way to improving their Flopzilla skills with my Flopzilla Pro Course: Kris Bursuc, Leroy Hunte and Antonio Altamirano. Thank you so much for getting the 3.75 hours of “do as you consume” video instruction and 19-page workbook with answer key.