Hold Em Authority - Texas Hold Em Strategy and advice for all levels of players

Alright, it’s what you’ve all been waiting for: the mother of all odds……POT ODDS. Please, take your excitement down a notch and focus here, this is complex stuff, and I require your undivided attention.

First off, how bout a definition? Pot odds is the ratio of the amount of money in the pot to the amount of money it will cost you to call a bet. I want you to reread that definition and let it sink in a little bit. Pot odds is the ratio of the amount of money in the pot to the amount of money it will cost you to call a bet.

A great site for understanding pot odds can be found here. I think that turning these odds into a percentage rather than a ratio makes things easier for me, so maybe you could try that as well. Really work on this example and understand it. I’ll give you another example right now.

Someone bets 100 into a 500 pot on the turn, meaning one more card is left to come. Should you call with the nut flush draw?
Here’s the solution: You would be calling 100 to win 600 more, so according to the equation, the percentage needed to justify the call is 14.3%, or 100/(100+600). Since we have 9 outs with 44 cards left in the deck, our percentage of hitting this flush is 20.45%. Our chance of winning the hand is much greater than our pot odds, so a call in this case will be profitable in the long run.

What’s next? Implied Odds. I didn’t call this a series for nothing; don’t put those calculators away just yet.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006 at 5:34 pm and is filed under Holdem Statistics & Calculations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.