A Basic Explanation Of Pot Odds
For many an online poker player, the concept of pot odds is an elusive one, but it’s actually fairly easy to get your head around the basics. The easiest explanation is this: pot odds are the ratio of the corrent size of the pot to the cost of a call you’ll need to make to win it. Let’s say there is $500 in a pot; if a player needs to call with $50, the pot odds are 500 to 50 (or 10 to 1.) Knowing how pot odds work is very important for the professional poker player, as they let them know how well they’re spending their bankroll at any given time.
Pot odds determine your expected value in a hand of poker. When a player has a hand that is behind now but is likely to win if a certain card is drawn, that’s when pot odds are used. They help a player determine the value of that hand when the player is faced with a bet. When the odds of drawing a card that wins the pot are numerically higher than the pot odds, the call is based on you having a positive expectation of the outcome. (In other words, you win a portion of the pot that is greater than the cost of the call on average.)
Conversely, if the odds of drawing a winning card are numerically lower than the pot odds, the call has a negative expectation, and you can expect to win less money on average than it costs to call the bet. Knowing when to walk away because the pot odds tell you how much you’ll lose unless you’re absolute right is an essential skill that all poker players should learn.
Perhaps not surprisingly, poker great Dave Slansky recommends using pot odds as part of your bluffing strategy. His overall theory is that a poker player should bluff a percentage of the time equal to his opponent’s pot odds to call a bluff. To use an example from his book, if a pot is $30 and a player is looking at a $30 bet (which will give his opponent 2-to-1 pot odds,) the player should bluff one out of every three times. (Or, half as often as he would bet for value.) This doesn’t take into account every situation, but it’s a good guideline for the player who wants to integrate bluffing into their regular poker play.
