Poker Free Online Games Swift Quick Guide To How To Use Pot Odds And How You Use Simple Poker Math To Figure Them Out At High Speed

In this poker free online games article we look at poker math and how you can use it when playing the new young aggressive style of play known to many as school 3 poker or more up to date school 2.

Some people may be surprised that poker is a math-based game.

Happily, for most people, poker math is not tricky once learned and there are some easy tricks that you can use to help you nail it.

Two Primary Concepts

The two most basic math concepts in poker are calculating your outs (and consequently your percentage chance of hitting one of them), and calculating pot odds.

In this article I am covering Pot Odds. In the previous article we did Outs. See the link at the bottom of this page to find the last article.

Without understanding the concept of pot odds we really have no idea if a call will be profitable (in postflop spots and allin spots especially).

Say you are Heads Up and each of you has 10BB stacks.

> Player 1 goes allin preflop. Player 2 has to decide whether to fold or call.

> This situation means that the pot is 11bb – the 10bb from player 1 plus 1bb put up by player 2, player 2 must decide to fold or to call 9bb for the chance to win 11bb.

This is generally expressed as a ratio, the size of the pot to the size of the call needed. In this instance, the pot odds would be 11:9 (11 to 9). Simplified, this is approximately 1.2:1.

This means that for a profitable call, player 2 has to win 1 time for every 1.2 times they lose (or, in other words, once out of every 2.2 pots).

When a player is getting 1 to 1 on their money, they need to win the pot 50% of the time to break even calling. They make a profit when they win at a higher rate than that.

But if they can get 2 to 1 then they only need to win 33% to break even calling, that equals 1 win for every 2 losses, or said another way 1 win out of every 3 pots. This is why when we’re short stacked it’s correct to go allin lighter and call allin bets wider.

Blinds for a big chunk of your chip stacks and give you the pot odds to call, and keep in mind that if you have 2 to 1 and win 35% of the time you’re in profit.

The key to successful application of pot odds is to assess your opponent over the range of hands you think he will have and from there reckon the value of your hand against that range. This is tricky, and requires lots of practice.

When faced with a call or fold situation, though, it comes down to estimating your outs against your opponent’s range (count your outs and use the rule of 2% and 4%) and compare that to the pot odds you’re getting. Not sure about Outs? Check out the big version of this lesson at the NoPay blog, link at the bottom of this page.

For example, if you have 9 outs on the flop with a flush draw, our call is profitable if we’re getting roughly 2 to 1 or better.

36% chance to hit our flush and win the hand, and getting 2 to 1 pot odds we need to win 1 time in 3, which is 33%. So we should call, as we make money long term even though we win the pot well under half the time.

However if we get only 1 to 1 odds, we will need to win 50% of the time. We just win ~36% of the time, therefore we can readily fold.

It’s important to remember, though, that pot odds are only perfect in call-or-fold spots when our calling ends the action in the hand, either because our opponent is allin or it’s on the river and our call or fold will end the hand.

If there is action yet to come (we are at the flop or Turn) then pot odds are not perfect, though it is unlikely that it will be a mistake to fold or call if the odds are heavily in favour.

If you have grasped everything up to this point, you’ve already learned some important concepts from this article.

The next free poker online lesson is going to be on Implied Odds.

Alternatively you can go and check out my much longer full lesson on poker math with Calculating Outs, implied odds, reverse implied odds and more at the NoPayPOKER.com free online poker training blog where you will discover all and get a link to a helpful pro if you’re stuck.

Tags: poker

Poker Free Online Games Swift Quick Guide To How To Use Pot Odds And How You Use Simple Poker Math To Figure Them Out At High Speed

Featured Video

Advertisment

Casino And Betting Programs

Book Store

Site Translation

Articles

Advertisement