I’m sorry to get technical right from the off in today’s installment of Back to Basics but today’s topic is a crucial one that newer players need to get their head round and indeed the quicker they do so, the quicker they will have less leaks in their game. I’m often asked by newer players, “How much should be willing to pay when I have a flush draw? or was this call right?” and the answers almost always lie in the pot odds of a given hand. My aim however is to stay as relatively simple as I can.
The most useful scenario when we can use pot odds to determine the right play is where we hold a flush draw with four cards to a flush on the flop. Let’s say we hold Ks 8s and the flop is Jh6s9s. The blinds are £1/£2 and our opponent raised to £8 before the flop and only we called. The pot is therefore £16. Our opponent bets £6 into the pot on the flop. Should we call?
1. The first step is to determine our odds of winning (card odds)
Let’s assume for a minute that we don’t think the King is a good card for us and our chance to win comes from making a flush. We know that there are four hearts gone from the deck and that leaves nine left. There are thus 47 cards in the deck that we don’t know (52- 5 on the flop) and nine cards from them help us. The easiest way to work out our chance of making our flush by the river is to multiply the number of outs we have by four. So that’s nine outs multiplied by four giving us a 36% or so chance of making a flush by the river or 2-1.
2. We then need to compare that with the pot odds.
Our opponent’s bet has brought the pot to £22 in total (£16 pre-flop plus a bet of £6). What this means is that we need to put in £6 to win what would become a pot of £28. The odds given by the pot are about 4.66-1.
Our odds of hitting a flush are 2-1 but the pot odds are 4.66-1 which means that we are expecting to make money every time that we make the call as we are giving up less money than the odds of winning. Such a play therefore has a positive expected value. When the pot odds are greater than the card odds, we should make the call but if our opponent made a pot sized bet of £16, we just wouldn’t have the odds to call.
I hope this example has been some help on the issue of pot odds and tomorrow I intend to talk about the concept in greater detail with more examples for you to examine.
This article was written by meshuganater.
Tags: advice, Back to Basics, poker strategy, Pot Odds, tactics
How low do the pot odds have to be to make it a bad call? Worse than 3-1?