Getting Started: Introducing Pot Odds
As the name suggest, pot odds are simply odds offered by the pot. If the pot in front of you contains 100 chips and it it costs you 10 chips to potentially win those 100 chips then your pot odds are 10-to-1
You have started to play online poker and are enjoying it. You win a little money, you lose a little money and are progressing nicely as a poker player. The very fact that you are checking out the Betfair Poker blog suggests that you want to improve at the game and see the times you win cash outnumber the times you do not.
In order for that to happen you are going to have to learn about the nuances of the game, what makes it tick and the mathematics of poker. Do not worry. We will break you in gently with a relatively simple concept that will help you ten-fold at the virtual felt. Are you ready to delve into the world of Pot Odds?
What Are Pot Odds?
As the name suggest, pot odds are simply odds offered by the pot. If the pot in front of you contains 100 chips and it it costs you 10 chips to potentially win those 100 chips then your pot odds are 10-to-1; 100 chips you stand to win divided by 10 it costs you to try and win them. It really is that simple. Divide the number of chips already in the pot by the number of chips it costs to call and potentially win that pot and you have your pot odds.
How Can Pot Odds Help Me?
Believe it or not but pot odds are a massive factor in any poker player's decision making. They are what make a certain play a profitable one in the long term and will also influence a player to make a fold; and here is why.
Say you have made it to the turn on a board that reads Kc-Qc-5s-9d and you are holding Ac-6c. Pretend we know 100% that your opponent holds Kh-Qh meaning you have to hit a club on the river and complete your flush in order to win the hand. Now, the pot has 100 chips in it and your opponent has bet just 20 (120 chips in the total pot), putting the action on you.
The first thing we have to do is work out our pot odds, which is simple here because we divide 120 by 20 and find we are being offered 6-to-1 pot odds. In this scenario you should call 100% of the time and it is not even close. Why? Because the odds being offered by the pot are greater than the odds of you hitting your flush on the river.
The odds of you hitting your flush with one card left to be dealt are around 4-to-1 (to make matters simple) so the fact the pot is offering you more than this means we can profitably make the call. Whilst we may not hit out flush on the river and we will have to fold our hand when our opponent bets again, if we were in this situation 100, 1,000 or 10,000 times then we would eventually make profit because on average we will miss out flush four times (costing us 80 chips) but one time in five we will hit the flush and win 120 chips; gifting us 40 chips profit.
Can I Alter An Opponent's Pot Odds?
Of course you can! Let's us the example above except we reverse the roles and we are sat with Kh-Qh on a Kc-Qc-5s-9d board and we know 100% out opponent holds Ac-6c. There are 100 chips in the middle of the pot so how much should we bet so that our opponent makes a mistake when he calls the bet? Well we now know that our opponent's odds of hitting his flush are around 4-to-1 so we should bet an amount that means the pot odds are less than this figure.
If we bet 50 chips then the total pot will be 150 and it will cost our opponent 50 chips to call. 150 divided by 50 equals three so our opponent would only be receiving 3-to-1 pot odds and if he calls he is making a mistake and we make our money in poker from the mistakes of others.
Fifty chip is also quite a good amount to bet because our opponent is going to be very tempted to make the call as he is almost getting the correct pot odds to do so. If we had bet 90 then he would be correct to fold and we would let him play perfect poker against us and we would not profit from him.
Although there are obviously many other factors that you need to consider when making a call or choosing the correct bet size in poker, pot odds should be governing your decision making by quite a degree. In future articles we will introduce implied and reverse implied pot odds, which allow you to make calls on the flop and turn without the correct pot odds!
Prices quoted in copy are correct at time of publication but liable to change.
