Poker Strategy: Pot Odds and Probability
This was published 19-04-2010It is necessary that all poker players should understand pot odds and probability. The good news is that it’s not a difficult concept, easy to understand (even for non maths geniuses), and one that you will always be able to use in the future.
In short, pot odds is what happens when you compare the cost of playing to how much you can win. For example, let’s look at this poker game that’s on the flop.
Let’s say there is seventy dollars in the pot and your poker opponent decides to move all in with his last ten dollars. It will therefore cost you ten bucks to call, after which you could win a total of eighty bucks. This will mean that your pot odds are 80 to 10, or 8 to 1, which is the same thing. Other ways of expressing the odds are 8:1 or 1:8. It does not matter in which order you write it or how your write it, as long as you know your story.
The formula for calculating pot odds is therefore:
All the money in the pot IN RELATION TO the money you would need to bet to win it.
Great, now you know how to calculate pot odds, but pot odds does not mean anything if you do not compare it to winning odds.
Let’s return to the above example where we said there is seventy dollars in the pot and your poker opponent decides to move all in with his last ten dollars. It will therefore cost you ten bucks to call, after which you could win a total of eighty bucks. The pot odds are 8:1. In this example your winning poker odds will have to be better than 8:1 if your call is to be correct. This means that if you call and your winning odds are worse, you are bound to lose money in the long run if you decide to call.
Therefore make sure that your winning odds are better than your pot odds if you want to continue to win money off poker games.
