The Online Poker Player Resource

What pot odds are and their application to poker is quite complex. David Sklansky, in many of his books goes into great detail on how players can use pot odds for their game. Here will find a quick overview to get your brain thinking about “pot odds.”

Pot odds are a conceptual tool used to help poker players decide what move is best to make. A “pot odd” is created from calculating what is in the pot, with how much it would cost to call a pot. For example, if it costs a player only $10 to call a pot that contains $100, he would be considered to have 10-1 pot odds.

A key part of applying pot odds to your Texas Hold’em game is in knowing how many outs you or your opponent has. Imagine you are involved in a hand with only one other player. The game has been played up to the flop (meaning the turn and river cards are the only ones left to be shown). Currently, your opponent has you beat, but you have a chance of catching the flush on the turn or river. If you do, you win instead and collect the pot. When a player only needs 1 card of a specific suit to make his flush, he has a total of only 9 outs. What this means is that there are 9 exact cards a player needs to draw and make his flush. This roughly translates to having about a 35% or an odd of 2-1 against to win on the turn or river.

One way to use “pot odds” then is to help determine whether a call is worth making or not. Using the above flush example, with a 2-1 against odds to win, in order to justify a call, your opponent or situation would have to offer you “pot odds” that are greater than 2-1. Here is why. According to the odds to win, (2-1) I the long run, you will be winning this bet 3 times out of 10. What this means is that statistics tells us, if you were to make this type of bet 10 times in a row, you would win a total of 3 times out of that ten. Now imagine an opponent says to you that it would cost 1 dollar for you to make this bet each time and the only possible amount you can win at EACH bet is just 1 dollar. This would give you 1-1 “pot odds.” This is terrible. If you risked 1 dollar each time, and only won 3 of the ten bets, in total you would lose 7 dollars. Now imagine if your opponent said that each of the 10 bets costs you only 1 dollar, but at each bet, you could win 10 dollars. This would give you a 10-1 “pot odds.” This is great because in the long run you would lose 7 dollars but you would have gain $30. This would make your total earnings a positive $23.

To recap, using “pot odds,” requires knowing what outs a player has. When you know the outs, you compare those odds to the “pot odds.” When the “pot odds” are larger than the odds to win, then a call would be a correct move. “Pot odds,” has many applications that cannot be covered here. Stay tuned for other examples of “pot odds,” applications.