Pot odds is a simple concept in poker used to determine if you should continue or fold facing a bet during a hand.
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Learning how to calculate pot odds quickly can help you in many decisions. It's a fundamental skill that's ingrained into the minds of successful poker players.
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There are 2 different ways to express pot odds. Ratio and Percentage. We will be comparing our card odds in this example to our pot odds to determine if we should call or fold. We'll go ahead and use the ratio form because it's the most commonly seen.
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Example: There is you and 1 opponent left in the hand. Our starting hand is Q J. (We won't worry about the suits this time.) Flop: T 9 3. We flopped an open-ended straight draw. Which means we need a K or 8 to complete our straight. The pot is $15, and our opponent bets $5 on the flop making the pot $20 total. Our pot odds ratio is 20:5 or 4:1 Should we call this bet given our card odds?
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- There are 8 cards in the deck that will improve our hand to the winning hand. 4 kings and 4 eights.
- There are 47 unknown cards. We know where 5 cards are (our 2 holecards, and 3 on the flop).
- There are 8 unknown cards we want (kings and eights) to the 39 others we don't. Our card odds ratio is 39:8 or about 5:1 for simplicity.
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Pot odds: 4:1
Card odds: 5:1
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This tells us that we should fold because our card odds > pot odds. If the opposite were true, then we would have enough equity to call. It's not always this simple to make a call. Implied odds is another subject I would love to write about. It also effects the likelihood of our profits.
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