We like to cover some basic poker fundamentals just to keep you on your toes and refreshed. A lot of advanced poker players think that they are above this type of stuff, but it affects every single hand that they play. For the beginner, these topics represent even more information that is useful for growing even better in poker. You don’t have to feel like you need to be a poker rockstar overnight. You can always study theses and feel them out on your own time. Many super players like Phil Hellmuth and Phil Ivey have been playing for years and years and years. If it’s taken them to become downright masterful with poker, then it’s obvious that you need to make sure that you give yourself enough time to learn poker.
So let’s dig in and talk about implied odds. A lot of people start with implied odds but they need to actually understand pot odds.
Where do pot odds come into play? With every hand, of course. Let’s say that you are on the flop with a great flush draw. You’ve got two spades in hand, and lucky you, there’s another two on the table now. Yet somebody else has spotted the same bit of good luck, and they’ve decided to bet. Now, they could be betting for the sake of sake, or they could have a real monster on their hands — and that kills your dream of putting more money in your bankroll at the end of the day.
So if you’re going to figure it out, you need to turn to pot odds, which can help you decide if you want to call, fold, or even raise.
It’s all about profitability based on the cards that you have as well as what’s on the table and even what other people are doing.
Pot odds can be used to make you money, because you will start looking at your options. In all honesty, this is the difference between a newbie who just plays by chance, and a skilled pro. You can bet that any of the WSOP darlings that are making headlines have a firm understanding of pot odds. Make sure that you do the same. It doesn’t really take very long to figure things out anyway.
To work out pot odds with a flush or straight draw, you basically want to look at how likely it is that you will make the flush or straight — or anything else you want to score. From there, you have to compare the size of the bet that you are facing with the size of the pot. It’s simple math from then on out.
OK, so it’s back to math time, right? Right. You need to look at how many cards you haven’t seen, and then figure out how many of those mysterious cards could make the draw (or straight) and which ones can’t do it at all. You put those numbers together and get a good and useful ratio.
Example time? Absolutely.
Say that your hand is actually As 4s, and the flop comes down Ks 9s 5d. You’re probably getting rather excited, since this gives you two chances to get what you want.
As everyone knows, there’s 52 cards in a pack, with 13 spades total. There’s 2 in the hand, and 2 on the flop. Don’t try to assume who has the other spades for hole cards. Simple math tells us that there are 9s’s remaining in the deck.
So there are 47 cards that we absolutely don’t know about. You take the total # of cards and subtract out the cards that you know about (your 2 cards and the 3 on the flop).
Useless cards = 47 – 9 = 38 useless cards that will never let us hit our goals.
The ratio would therefore be useless cards / useful cards. 38:9 – 4:1.
It’s a ratio that tells us that for every 4 times there’s a useless card, there’s going to be that one time you get a spade (in this case, our useful card) and complete your flush. So let’s compare it to a radio we can use to look at the size of the bet that we have to face.
You need to now go to the size of the pot and the bet size.
So a $20 bet going into a $100 pot would be 120:20, or 6:1. You can use a pot odds calculator to speed this up.
So let’s compare the two fully — using the 6:1 ratio. The pot odds are larger than the odds of completing the draw, which means that this is a profitable move. it’s long term thinking at its finest, but who cares? It’s a good thing all around.
So if your pot odds are bigger — call. Most definitely. However, it’s important to realize that the opposite is true — if the pot odds are smaller, it’s time to fold. This is where poker players get in trouble, because they don’t think that they have to fold. They don’t think that they’re going to lose so they go overboard with betting. Again, this is the mark of a newbie. Not because you’re wrong — sometimes you’ll get a lucky break. But poker is a game of skill, so you need to have some sort of reason why you do the things that you do.
This is a simple pot odds that looks only at the next card. What about that sneaky river, the patron saint of newbie players everywhere? We’re getting to that.
The key here is that you want to work each card separately. If you combine them, you’re making the assumption that you’re not going to put any more money on the turn to see the river. But if there are other bets coming in, you might have to put in that money after all. That definitely changes the game a little bit.
So what about the implied odds that we were talking about at the beginning? They go hand in hand. Thankfully, there are no calculations that you need to make. In a nutshell, implied odds are all about the money you expect to win after you complete the hand itself.
So if you make a call on that flop with your flush draw (spades in our case), and then get your flush right on the turn, your implied odds will be the amount of money you extract from your opponent on the turn and river. Any money that gets into the pot after you make the call will be your implied odds.
This is important because it includes the money you can expect to win on future betting rounds.
Pot odds = money that is currently in the pot
Implied pot odds = money that will be in the pot in the future.
If you have good implied odds, you can pay a little more to see the next card. However, if you didn’t calculate this out, you would be playing blind where it’s not warranted.
Using these concepts in the wild might be tricky at first, but don’t think of it that way. Keep in mind that the more “hidden” your hand is, the bigger your implied odds are going to be. It’s all about profit and if you have good implied odds, you with be able to call a hand that would otherwise be a fold.
This is where it pays to be subtle in some hands, because you don’t want anyone to assume you have a monster and therefore they will not put a lot of money in the pot. You want to coax people out of their shells. That’s just the way to go.
Generally speaking, straights and sets have the best implied odds, while flushes have the worst implied odds.
In the next guide, we’ll take on reverse implied odds — stay tuned!