It is not the process of calculating pot odds that gives poker one of its psychological attractions, but the fact that the odds provide some idea of how much can be won from the full round with a given hand. They can form a valuable background on which to form strategies and make decisions.
Moreover, if players want to be able to explain the fluctuating value of their hand, they need to learn the theory of poker equity. In many respects, poker is much more mathematical than it might appear at first glance; beneath all the thinking and ‘reading people’ stuff that pundits like to tout, poker is a maths game through and through.
Hand rankings
Understanding pot odds is important, because it helps you make better poker decisions that will increase your edge over time. However, it’s important to remember that pot odds aren’t hand-strength based; so you should use them in conjunction with other cues, such as table position, when making decisions.
Your implied odds are part of your pot odds, and are agreed-on abbreviated pot odds that account for money from later streets that may get added to the pot; they are always lower than pot odds.
For example, if you have a flush draw and an opponent is chasing a straight, you might have 9 outs (31 per cent) to his 5 outs (18 per cent). Against pot odds of 2-1, you should fold. Want to know how to count your outs and figure your pot odds? Watch LearnWPT videos about out counting and pot odds.
Betting intervals
The essential concept of poker is pot odds, the ratio of the size of the pot versus the sum needed to call bets, determining whether a hand might win.
Sometimes, even when your hand has the betting odds, you might not want to call just because opponents might keep betting further streets on later streets if they hold stronger hands and betting further into the pot. That’s why implied pot odds are so important.
Implied pot odds are a method of evaluating favourably, based upon your opponents’ bets and actions in the past (or when they don’t bet, as in the case of a check or a fold preflop), the likelihood that they are holding strong hands, thereby predicting how often your opponents fold hands and providing the high-skilled player with the ‘information’ needed to successfully ‘level’ or ‘level multiple times’ and ‘guess’ or ‘guess multiple times’ at their holding. By ‘leveling’ or ‘level multiple times’ is meant playing one’s cards as close (within a small betting range, such as raising 1.0, 1.5 or 2.0 big blinds, and not two, three or 3.5) as the strength of their starting or hand value (were in-the-hand value measurable, antebellum). By ‘guess’, or ‘guess multiple times’, is meant the skill with which the poker player ‘guesses’, or ‘guesses multiple times’, the strength of the cards held by their opponents. By ‘information’, we mean the ability to infer the probabilities of opponents holding strong hands, based on past play – namely, their bets and actions and in the case at hand, the length of the chain of ‘guesses’ and ‘guesses multiple times’. The method or play (of ‘level’ and in the language of Bayesians, their ‘posteriors’, as each guess provides us with new potential or Bayesian posterior probability), involves the skill with which a player adheres to the betting strategy. By ‘betting strategy’, we mean the play arising out of the methodology just described, where antebellum (pre-20th century), zero-sum poker players raise or fold using the ‘science’ of odds (in the shared sense of poker currently) in a series of bets interconnected via computations of odds, with each interconnected series ending in either a ‘guess’, or ‘guess multiple times’, a ‘level’, or ‘level multiple times’ and, finally, a bet, fold or call, according to the betting strategy.
All-in
Poker, after all, is a maths and probabilities game. Competent poker players use pot odds and equity considerations to make correct, advantageous decisions in almost every hand they play – and become even more successful at the game when they’ve mastered everything.
Pot odds are a calculation of the money in the pot divided by how much you would have to call a bet to continue ahead playing. This is the percentage of your chances making the draw you need to call the bet.
But the reason that standard pot odds cannot do it is that they don’t consider future betting. Once you’ve altered your sum in accordance with implied pot odds, your chances of winning the hand are more likely to be close to correct.
Folding
In poker, a card game, players wager on their respective hands, or ‘hands’. To be good at poker, it helps to know many strategies – such as calculating pot odds, a ratio of the size of the pot to the amount that’s needed to call a given bet, necessary to determine whether any hand is worth playing or calling back in.
But positive pot odds can help you size your bets accordingly. For example, if you want to get all the money in against an opponent who’s drawing to a flush, then sizing your bets accurately might price him or her out of a call on the river, even if you have the second-nut flush draw against their overcard-heavy eight-high draw – although, of course, they could also be bluffing; not all bets work!
Learning pot odds is the key to making money at the poker table – it will tell you whether or not you should call the other guy’s bet, but also how big you should raise when you make a bet yourself. Want to learn how to calculate this statistic? Check out Episode 37 of learnWPT for shortcuts to running basic pot odds calculations.