Let's say you were to make this call 100 times. It's clear that calling isn't such a good choice - that the pot odds aren't favorable for calling - because over the long term calling is not a profitable play. You can see six cards (the two in your hand plus the four on the board), leaving 46 unknown cards, so you can estimate your chance of seeing a club fall on the river to be 9 out of 46, or just over 4-to-1 against.Ĭompare your pot odds (3-to-1 to call) to the odds you'll make your flush (a little worse than 4-to-1 against). You believe you probably have to make a flush in order to make a better hand than your opponent's, so that means you have nine outs - the nine remaining clubs - to make your hand. It's easy enough to see that the reward is $180 ($120 in the pot plus the $60 bet), and so with a $60 risk you are getting 180-to-60 or 3-to-1 pot odds. You could call to see the river card, but are the pot odds favorable enough for you to make the call? There is $120 in the pot, and your opponent has bet $60. Say you are on a flush draw and have with the board showing. Using Pot Odds When Playing a Drawing Hand Let's look at three common circumstances in no-limit hold'em in which pot odds can be helpful when making decisions. One big reason why you want to stay generally aware of what your pot odds are - which means keeping track of how big the pot is at all times and being able to compare the pot size to each bet - is that doing so helps you estimate whether or not the pot odds being offered to you are favorable or unfavorable given the situation. That might seem simple enough - a little bit of addition and an easy division problem, and you can calculate pot odds.īut why bother? There are lots of reasons. That would mean your opponent has to call $60 to have a chance at winning what is now $180 in the middle - 180-to-60 or 3-to-1 pot odds. Say you decide not just to call that $20 bet described above, but to raise to $80. Of course, you can also talk about pot odds after a player raises. You add the amount of the bet to what is already in the pot to calculate the reward, the bet you need to call represents the risk, and the pot odds "being given" to call is that reward-to-risk ratio. That's the scenario poker players most often describe when talking about pot odds - that is, when facing a bet and deciding whether or not to call or fold. In this case you're having to risk $20 to win $100, so your pot odds are 100-to-20, or 5-to-1. Pot odds are expressed as a ratio (reward-to-risk). That $100 is the reward you can get if you're willing to risk $20 to call the bet. Calculating Pot Oddsįor example, if there is $80 in the pot and your opponent bets $20, that makes a total of $100 in the middle. Put most simply, pot odds represents the ratio between what you stand to gain in a hand of poker and what you have to spend in order to get it - that is, the ratio between your reward and your risk when making any given decision during a poker hand. One of the first and most important examples of "poker math" that new no-limit hold'em players need to learn is how to calculate "pot odds." In fact, when people talk about the "math of poker," a lot of the time they are mostly referring to pot odds and how an understanding of them can help you decide whether to bet, raise, call, or fold.
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