POKER STRATEGY AND LESSONS - Simple Poker Pot Odds

One of the hardest strategy lessons to learn in Poker is to not chase cards on the turn or the river, unless of course, it is profitable for you to do so. Learning how to calculate pot odds is your mathematical solution to making this difficult poker decision. Put very simply, playing pot odds means knowing what your chances of pulling the card you need to make your hand a winner and weighing those chances against the size of the pot. Here is a very basic example of poker odds calculation.

You have Queen/Jack and the flop is King/10/4 at a HoldEm $1/$2 limit table. In this situation you have eight poker outs, or cards which will give you a good chance of winning the hand. There are four Aces and four nines, any of which will give you a straight. You know what five of the cards are, the two in your hand and the three on the table. This leaves 47 cards which could show up on the turn. Your chances of pulling one of the eight cards you need are 8 out of 47. This gives you about a 1 in 6 chance.

A very simple way of doing this calculation quickly is to double your outs, add one and use this as your percentage for pulling the right card. You have 8 outs, your percentage is approximately 17 percent ((8 * 2) + 1).

Now you know your chances of getting the card you need and the player to your left bets $1. You can use this information to decide whether it makes sense for you to pay $1 to chase the eight cards you need. You do this by taking the amount of the pot into account. Simply add the amount in the middle to the bets by other players so far. Since this is a simple example, here are a couple of simple, yet realistic, scenarios you will see every day when you play:

1. The middle contains $9, the person to your left bets $1. The total pot is $10. Should you stay in? Since you have a one in six chance of getting the card you need it makes sense to stay in the pot. In other words, if this exact scenario happened six times, odds are you would pay $6 total and win $10 once. If you are using the percentage, you have to pay a bet equivalent to 10% of the pot, but you have a 17% chance of winning. Those are good odds.

2. The middle contains $4, the person to your left bet $1. The total pot is $5. In this case you should fold. If this scenario happened six times, odds are you would pay $6 total and win $5 once. If you are using percentages, you have to pay a bet equivalent to 20% of the pot, but you only have a 17% chance of winning.

Start with this information. After using these techniques a little while, you will start to see other factors which have to be taken into account such as the tendencies of the other players at the table and the strength of your hand if you get the card you need. You will learn to look for those scenarios only through experience. 

Most sites tell you to figure your odds at the turn and take the river into account also, doubling your odds. This makes no sense to me since pot odds change for each card. Yes, it is possible it will still make sense to stay in the hand for the river if you do not get your card on the turn, but until you get to that point you will not know.

Approximate Pot Odds of common situations:

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