Pot Odds

Pot Odds are important in Poker because they allow you to calculate whether or not a hand is worth betting on. When the flop has been dealt you will be in one of three situations.

1) You have completely missed the board and have nothing worth betting on.  You should check and/or fold.

2) You hit the board well and have a great hand. For example a pair of Kings ( one a hole card and one on the board ) with the chance of a straight.

3) You have a Drawing Hand. Although of little value in itself it has the potential to become a winning hand if the turn or River cards make your hand complete.

For example your hole cards are Ah Kh and the board cards are 5h 7h 10d. If the Turn or River cards are a King or an Ace you would have a top pair and if either were a Heart of any value you would have a flush.

We need a way to calculate how likely we are to draw that winning hand and then to assess whether or not a bet is worth risking for the size of the pot. This is where we use pot odds. There are two ways of using pot odds, one way is to compare the probability of drawing your hand to the risk reward ratio of your bet to the pot and the other is to express these factors as percentages for the purposes of comparison. This article deals with the percentage way of assessing pot odds.

First  of all count the number of outs you have to make your hand. An out is a card that would improve your hand that is not yet known to you. It may be still in the deck or even held by one of the other players it makes no difference.  For example you are holding Jh 10h, and the flop was Qd, 9c and 4s you have an open ended straight draw. A card at either end of the sequence of cards would give you a straight. There are four suits and either a King or an 8 would make the hand therefore you have 8 outs.  As a rule of thumb because there are around 50 cards not in your hand or on the board at any one time you can express the outs as a percentage by doubling the number of outs and adding 1. So in our example 2x8 is 16 add one gives us a 17% chance of drawing our hand.

We can use this to calculate the highest bet that we should call by adding the value of the pot to the bet we would have to make and then multiplying that amount by our percentage pot odds.

If we take the above example and imagine a pot of $90 and our bet were $10 we would add 10 to 90 to get 100 multiply by 17 to get a a figure of $17 as the highest amount we should bet. We need only bet $10 so the bet is worthwhile.

If however the bet was $20 instead with the pot still $90, adding 20 to 90 would give us 110. Multiplying 110 by 17%  gives $18.7  as the highest bet we should make, less than the $20 required. So we should not make this bet.