Knowing how to calculate odds and outs is required to be a winning player. We will cover the basics of calculating outs and odds.
Calculating Odds
The outs are the cards that are in the deck that can help you improve your hand, say you have AKs (ace and king of the same suit: diamonds) and you flop two diamonds but nothing else your current hand is ace high). To improve your hand you need one diamond. There are 13 total in the deck and you know four of these are not in the deck (you’re holding two of them and two of them are on the table face up) that gives you (13 – 4) or 9 outs. Knowing the amount of card in the deck is 52 and you see 5 of them are not you calculate your outs on (52 – 5) that is 47 cards.
Having that much information it’s possible to know how if you’re likely to make your hand or not:
- 38 of the 47 cards are not diamonds
- 9 of the 47 card are diamonds
That’s 9 chances on 38 or 38:9 which is about 4:1 but we’re not done here, we have to take in consideration that two cards are left to be shown, this means that you have about 2:1 or one chance on two of seeing a diamond in the next two cards. It’s this simple. Of course we left the possibility of improving our AKs of diamond by hitting an ace or king by the river and that gives us even more odds, but this is obvious and you should be happy with 2:1 odds of making an ace high flush holding this power hand.
Pot Odds
The pot odds is used in conjunction with your odds of improving your hand as we will discuss in the next paragraph, if we take the previous scenario and flop a flush draw with AKs, the pot is already at 800$ and someone puts you all-in for 3000$ you should probably fold as you have 2:1 chances of hitting a diamond but the pot odds are about 1:3. On another level, if someone bets 400$ into the 800$ pot it gives you the perfect odds to call and remain in this powerful position.
Phil Gordon provides an easy way to calculate odds in the following video:
Purchase Phil Gordon’s Final Table Poker DVD
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Making Decisions
Whenever the pot odds are greater than the odds of you improving your hand you should call. On the same level you should fold whenever the opposite is true. Being able to calculate odds quickly and putting this statistical strategy to work in every hand will alone help your winnings improve considerably.
If you have read one of my previous articles about EV and Mzone you probably already know about the 3rd party application I’m using which calculates everything for you automatically with no interaction from your end. Using this program allows me to pay more attention to details of the table’s actions as opposed to focus on doing the math in my head.
Here is an image of tournament indicator in action:
As you can see from that picture we have a straight draw and Tournament Indicator displays the odds you have to improve and hit the straight as well as your pot odds. You have just learned that if your pot odds are greater than your odds of making your straight you’re in good position and will want to call. There are exceptions to that rule, however, they are discussed in the advanced articles.
Sphere: Related ContentTags: hand ranking, king, odds, outs, Phil Gordon, pot odds, Statistics, USD, winning player
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