How to Calculate Pot
Odds and Use your Equity to your Advantage
Developing an understanding of
pot odds and equity is probably one of the most important theories
that every poker player must have at least some grasp off. Every
situation at the poker table where having the information of either
your pot odds or equity in the hand will have some bearing on your
final decision.
Some of the top poker players
in the world often have sophisticated backgrounds in either maths
or economics and have near flawless skills when it comes to quickly
working out the percentages of a hand. Once they can do this all
they need to learn is what price they need and what price they are
getting, so from there they can make the correct decision almost
every time.
The link is no coincidence, its
fact. Even players who have little mathematical background have
spent hours working on their games and honing their odds and equity
equations to perfect their play. Often they will couple this
alongside a lot of ‘feel’ play, but it’s still a significant
factor.
Understanding your pot odds and
equity in a hand can give you a fantastic basis in which to make
serious money from poker. A simple rule that’s commonly used
throughout the poker community is ’If our odds are larger than
that off our equity, then we are making profitable plays; if our
odds are less, then our play no longer becomes profitable.
‘
Throughout this article we will
be looking at both pot odds and equity with examples for each,
before looking over some key points to evaluate.
Pot
Odds
When starting off with working
out your pot odds what you must do is keep track of how much
exactly is in the pot. When playing online there is often a feature
that does this for you, or at least an option that you can turn on
in most poker lobbies.
When playing live it becomes a
little more difficult and can become quite a skill. A good way to
go about is by observing a hand that you are not involved in or at
least are not intending to play.
Try to keep a running total in
your head of how much each player puts in the pot at once rather
than counting the chips that are scattered all over the table. By
doing this you can get a great idea of the exact amount of chips
each player has invested in the hand.
The next step is to sort out
how much it will be to call given the bet size and the size of the
pot. There are two methods which can be used here, the ratio method
and the fractional method. Both have their own merits but for this
example we will be using the ratio method.
So let’s say it’s $10 to
call in a pot which is already $50. $10/$50 = 5 giving our ratio of
5.0/1 to make the call.
Obvious for each player who in
turn acts after us their pot odds will be slightly different as the
pot size will be different.
A slightly tougher example
would be if we had to call $40 in a pot of $175. We can work out
quickly in our heads that roughly our odds will be around 4.0/1.
Simply knowing that 40 goes into 160 4 times exactly and the fact
that 160 is close to our target of 175. With pot odds we don’t
need to be exact, just as close as we can get in the timescale we
have to act with our hand.
Equity
Once we have distinguished our
pot odds we now need to work out our equity in the hand. The equity
is basically how many cards are left in the pack you need to make
your hand.
It’s impossible to know your
opponents exact hand so trying to incorporate them into our equity
ranges calculations are next to pointless. What we must remember
is, that when we do work out our equity we take into account that
we already hold two of the cards and also there are cards already
on the board that we must disregard.
A simple rule when calculating
equity is multiply outs by four on the flop and multiply by two on
the turn. This equation may not get you the exact number you are
looking for every time, but will not be far away and provides a
simple piece of math that you can work out at game time.
So let’s say we are chasing
an open ended straight draw on the flop. There are four cards of
each number that will complete our draw giving us 8 outs. We then
use our rule and times our outs by four, giving us 32 or 32% of
hitting our straight draw.
For a flush draw we know that
there are 13 cards of each suit, we hold two and two are already on
the flop resulting in 9 outs. Our 9 outs times by four give us a
36% chance of completing our flush.
Combining Pot odds and
Equity
Once we can work both variables
out, we can then establish whether the call is profitable or not.
Remember early on in the article we mention the golden rule ’If
our odds are larger than that off our equity, then we are making
profitable plays; if our odds are less, then our play no longer
becomes profitable. ‘
We can now successfully apply
this rule and determine if mathematically we are getting the
correct odds to make a profitable call or in fact if our call will
be incorrect actually loosing us money in the long term
.
Key
Points
- Learning these mathematical
skills can be an extremely profitable base to launch your poker
career
- Practice learning how many
outs each drawing hand has so it sticks in your memory
- When using your pot odds
remember to keep track of the pot
- Combining both pot odds and
equity will all you make the perfect decision mathematically every
time
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