Implied Poker Odds

I brought up the concept of pot odds in the 1st article, and now it would be a good idea to build on that concept and talk about implied odds. As we talked about in the first entry, bankroll management must be followed at all times because occasionally you’ll be in pots where you’ll be forced to get your money in while behind. Our poker odds table helped show that you will obviously lose a fair number of these pots, and at times it’s difficult to get away from these spots even if you’re going with only solid Texas Hold Em hands preflop. When we discuss implied odds, there will be a theme that’s similar in the fact that we’re also putting our money in with a worse hand. With pot odds we do it because it’s mathematically correct. With implied odds we do it because of future expectation.

To see what I mean, let’s go back to the example of flopping a flush draw from the last entry. We were playing a tournament on a Full Tilt Poker download and we flopped a flush draw. We’ll make it slightly different though: let’s assume that our opponent does not raise all-in over our bet and, instead, raises 600 more chips. Considering just pot odds, this 600 raise is too many chips because, as we saw last time, only raises less than 500 allow us to call. However, let’s say that our opponent has 1,000 chips left in his stack and we are very sure that he will put the rest of his chips in no matter what the turn and river are. To retain the premise that you’ll see both the turn and river if you call, let’s also assume that he checks the turn 100% of the time. This sets up a situation in which it becomes correct to calculate implied odds rather than pot odds. There are 1,000 chips in the pot and he has 1,000 chips behind. Since we expect those chips to be in the pot by the river, you can consider that the pot has 2,000 chips rather than just 1,000. 600 to call divided by 2,000 in the implied pot gives you 0.30, and since you’ll hit your flush around 33% of the time, the call is profitable here.

So far you’ve seen that with a poker odds chart you can figure out pot odds and implied odds, and together they can be very powerful. A novice player has a lot of potential to lose money at the wrong time with his draws. For example, he could call a bet without correct pot odds, and we’ve seen that this yields a negative expectation. Or maybe he’ll have a draw and his opponent will be giving him great implied odds to call, but he won’t do so because he sees that the pot odds aren’t there. MTT poker and cash games alike require you to know about both pot odds and implied odds to make as much money as possible when you have draws.

Before I finish off, I’d just like to advise you to be a bit careful with this new knowledge. Sometimes those new to the game begin calling with anything and everything when they are taught implied odds because they think they’ll always get paid off when they get the cards they need. You must be sure that your opponent will pay you off when you’re considering his chips in implied odds calculations. Let’s imagine that you’re getting dealt poker hands in one of the US poker rooms and you turn a set, but it seems that it wasn’t the best card because it also gave your opponent a flush. You start calculating your implied odds when he raises because the only way you can win this hand is by hitting a full house on the river. For this calculation, you must decide whether or not he’s likely to pay you off on a paired river. He might not do so because he might realize that you hit a boat! If you assume that you’ll get paid off when you actually won’t, you’re going to make a lot of incorrect calls which will severely hurt your bottom line in the long run.