Getting the Right Odds in Poker

Before we begin, I'd like to make a note of the notation I'll be using to denote the cards in this article. When I say a card, for example 9h, the first character will be the value of the card, 2-9 or T-A (T stands for ten), while the second character will be the suit of the card, h for hearts, s for spades, c for clubs, and d for diamonds. With that out of the way, let's get started.

Let's say you're playing a no-limit hold'em game with $200 stacks and blinds at $1/2 with 10 players at the table. You're on the button with Ad 6d and someone in early position raises to $5. Another person calls the raise, you call the raise, and everyone else, including the blinds, fold. The pot is now $18, and the flop comes Kd 7d 2s, giving you a flush draw. The preflop raiser bets $10 which is called by the player before you in the hand. The pot is $38 now and it's $10 on you to call. What we want to know is do you have good enough odds so that you can call this $10 bet in hopes of making your flush draw profitably? Decisions like this are what separate the skill-based game of poker from luck-based games like roulette or the lottery, so we want to make sure we make the right decision.

Before we can decide whether it's right to call or fold, we need two pieces of information. First we need to know the odds of making our draw. This is pretty easy, as there are nine diamonds we haven't seen yet and forty-seven cards we haven't seen yet, the odds to make our draw on the next hand are 47 to 9, or about 5.2 to 1. The next piece of information we need to calculate is our pot odds, or the ratio of the amount we have to call to what's already in the pot. Well here since we have a pot of $38 and we need to call $10 to stay in the hand, we have pot odds of 38 to 10, or 3.8 to 1.

When you compare our odds to hit our draw with our pot odds, you'll notice that the odds to hit our draw are worse than our pot odds. This is to say that we would prefer if our pot odds were greater than our odds to hit our draw. If you don't understand what I mean by this, then let's see what would happen if we played this hand over 100 times and called each time.