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Calculating Hold'em Pot Odds Quickly
You have a hand that is borderline, there is money in the pot, and you are quickly coming the crossroads where you must either invest more money into this hand or fold and try to make a dent into the 6ft sub that had been recently delivered. It is at this moment that some folks begin to with that the psychic friends network was still in business. In lieu of a good fortune teller though, we have one thing to help us during such times. We have mathematics.
Many players, at least the good ones, rely on figuring out pot odds to help them decide when it is time to stay in hand and when it is time to hit the eject button and fold.
For those who are unfamiliar pot odds, they can best be described as the amount of money you must contribute to the pot to stay in the game compared to the amount of money in the pot. This can be turn into a calculation that will tell you the odds of actually winning the hand.
Let's pretend that a hand of Hold'em is playing. Your Hole Cards are both spades. On the flop, two more spades appear. Obviously you start thinking about a spade flush. So how do you calculate your chances of actually making your hand?
Begin the process by counting your outs. There are a total of thirteen spades, four of them are available to you, therefore there are 9 cards that can help you attain your flush. Multiply the number of outs by 4 (9x4 = 36). If number of outs exceeds eight, subtract 1 from the equation. This turns your 36 into a 35. This means you will make your flush 35% of the time.
The spade did not show up on the turn, so now we come to the river card. The river is the last card, so your odds have not changed. No longer are you getting a 35% chance of making your hand. On the river, take the number of outs (9) and multiple it by 2 (9x2 = 18). Now that you have figured your chances of drawing a spade on the river are 18%, add 1% if you started with more than 6 outs. So you the chances of hitting a spade flush have gone down to 19%.
So is 19%, good enough for us to make the bet? Well you can go with your instincts, but if you had any sort of confidence in those, you wouldn't be going to all the mental trouble of figuring out the odds. So what you do now is divide the pot by the bet amount. If the pot is $120 and it will take $18 to stay in you divide 120 by 18 (120/18 = 6.6666666). Round up to the nearest whole number (7). Now divide 100 by 7 (100/7 = 14 with a remainder of 2). You than divide your remainder by that 7 that appeared when you divided 120 by 18. The number you get is 3.5, or approximately 1/3. This gives us approximate pot odds of 14 1/3 %.
So is this a situation where you should enthusiastically bet? The general rule of thumb states that if the percentage of the bet in relation to the pot is greater than the chances of you hitting your hand, don't bet. In this case, you have a 19% chance of getting your spade flush, and the bet is 14 1/3 % percent of the pot, the odds say go for it.
At first blush this looks like something that would give anyone a migraine, especially when your trying to do it on the fly during a hand. Like anything else though, the more you do it, the easier it gets. This is one of those times where the payoff of getting good at figuring out the odds is worth the trouble of learning to do this quickly. Just be sure to bring some aspiring to your next card game.
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