Poker Odds

If you’re seeing flops with strong hole cards, you’re usually going to fare quite well when it comes to post flop action. Occasionally, however, you will flop a draw post flop and you’ll need to catch one of your outs in order to win the pot. These situations are examples of why it’s crucial to follow correct bankroll management – you are guaranteed to lose some of these pots. There will definitely be times when it is correct to put the rest of your chips in the pot even if you’re not a favorite to win the hand. Knowing about pot odds will make it more clear when it comes to choosing between calling to hit and folding.

Many people imagine that poker is just a gambling game and don’t see that math is also a big part of it. Don’t be afraid of it, however, for it’s nothing like the differential equations you struggled with in university. If you look online, you’ll find many tools that handle the math stuff for you. Where poker odds are concerned, you’re going to want to use a poker odds chart, a tool we used back in the poker hand order entry. Like we discussed before, you will want this chart when you find yourself in a pot and you’re not sure whether or not your hand is better than your opponent’s.

Let me give you another example in case you can’t remember the poker hands order entry very well. Pretend that you’re getting dealt poker hands in a $0.50/$1.00 NL cash game and you receive AK. You choose to raise it up preflop to $3.75, and a very loose player reraises you to $14. You’ve seen him do this before, so maybe you should go all-in to try to make it look like you’re bluffing? Your stack goes into the middle, and when he calls with 33, you can’t hide your surprise. Do you think your hand is ahead or behind? If you put the hands into our trusty poker odds chart, you’ll see that you’re only 46% to win this showdown. You can see that the chart is useful for calculating odds so that we don’t have to memorize them all.

Let’s talk about pot odds now. You use this when you’re playing a hand and you come across a spot where your opponent bets, but you don’t think you have the best hand at the moment. For example, imagine you’re using a Full Tilt Poker download and you’re playing a small tournament. You flop a flush draw in a heads-up pot and you bet, but your opponent goes all-in. You think that your opponent’s most likely hand is top pair and he is trying to push you off your draw. Is it better to call or fold?

With a flopped flush draw and turn and river to come, your odds of hitting the flush are about 1 in 3. This means that in order for it to be correct to call here, the pot must be more than twice as much as the amount your opponent is forcing you to call. For instance, if the pot contains 1,000 chips, you need to be calling less than 500 chips for the call to be corret. If you have to put in 425, then the call is good. If you must call 600, you will lose money in the long run by making this call.

This article has showed you that learning about odds is extremely helpful for MTT poker and ring games alike. You have a much better chance if you understand odds since several players out there don’t know how important they are.