Pot odds are defined by the price you are getting on the bet compared to the size of the total pot, so if the pot is $3 and you have to call $1 into the pot you will be getting 3:1 in pot odds.
What do we need this information for?
This is useful in knowing whether we are getting the correct price to draw to our hand, for example, if we flop an open-ended straight draw against our opponent and we need to hit our hand in order to win the pot we will have around 34% equity…
If our opponent bets $3 into a pot of $8 what are the odds we are getting to call?
How do we calculate our Pot Odds?
We would need to call $3 into a total of $14…
to work this out we just divide 3/14 = 0.2142
Then just times this number by 100 to get the percentage of equity needed
0.2142 x 100 = 21.42, this is the percentage of equity we need to continue in the pot 21.42%
So in this case we are getting a good price to continue with our hand here, if say our opponent bets larger though…
If our opponent bets $8 into the pot of $8 on the flop, what odds will we have then?
So, in this case, we need to call $8 into a total pot of now $24…
8/24 = 0.3333 x 100 = 33.33% equity needed
So you can see that this is getting a little closer to a poor price, as we will not realise all our equity if we will only call this one bet, a general rule on how much equity we will realise if only seeing one card is halve the amount of the percentage
What about implied odds?
So there is something else to think about with regards to odds in poker and that is implied odds. This is our odds of getting more money from our opponents stack if we hit our hand, so in deep SPR ratios, we can deviate slightly from calling getting the right price for our hand because if we hit our hand we will be in a position to win a large pot from our opponents remaining stack.
On the other side of this coin though, we are going to want to play more carefully in situations where we don’t have great implied odds, so if our opponent is pretty short-stacked there is often little point in us drawing to our hand when if we hit it we stand to win very little more from their stack.
Sum up on Pot Odds
How to quickly work out your equity and odds:
If you have a drawing hand like a flush draw you will have 9 outs to make a flush, with around 47 cards in the deck you can take your outs and times that number by two to get your odds of hitting your card…
So 9×2 = 18% chance of hitting your card on the next card
We have created a little cheat sheet for you to know how much equity you need to be able to call bets too!
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