Pot Odds Implied Odds

Odds of Improving Your Hand

If you do not have a made hand after the flop you need to know exactly how many cards there to improve your hand. These improving cards are called "outs". Learning to calculate the number of outs correctly will give you advantage of your opponents.

Odds of improving your hand are calculated as follows:

#unseen cards/#outs

Lets say you you hold A-K of spades

The flop comes 8s 9h 2s. You now have a good draw to the nut flush. There are 13 spades in the deck so that leaves 9 spades. So you have 9 outs. 47 cards have not been seen. So the odds of making the flush on the turn are calculated as follows:

47/9 = 4.2 to 1

To calculate the odds on the river use 46 as the number of unseen cards.

Pot Odds

Pot odds are the ratio of the amount of money in the pot compared to the amount to call a bet. Pot odds are the most important thing to consider before calling a bet when you are trying to improve your hand. Pots odds are calculated as follows:

Bet/(pot + bet)

For example, if there is $10 in the pot and the bet to call is $2 then the post odds are would be:

2/(10+2) = 6 to 1 pot odds

You should only call this bet if the odds of improving your hand is better than 6 to 1.

Implied Odds

Implied odds are the same as pot odds but take into account the amount of money that will be contributed to the pot in the future. Lets say your odds of improving your hand is 7 to 1 Using our example above of 6 to 1 pots odds you would fold. But lets say if you made your hand you could collect 3 more bets from your opponents. So the implied odds are in your favor to call the bet. But a lot of players mistakenly assume if they make the hand they'll win it and this can cost them a ton of money in the long run.