Can someone explain pot odds to me please?

[Revolver123]

This is a concept I just can't quite grasp. Using the concept of pot odds, people seem to call in situations where they are beat or have such a low percentage of hitting their card (ie gutshot straight). Can someone tell me how to calculate pot odds?

[kb coolman]

Pot odds is the amount of money to call vs. the amount of money already in the pot.

Calling $1 into a $3 pot would give you 3:1 pot odds.

This is balanced against your outs to determine if a call is +EV. For instance, you pick up a flush draw on the turn. You don't hold any over cards, but we'll assume if you river the flush, you will hold the best hand. At this point, you have 9 outs, with 46 cards left in the deck (we only subtract the cards we know about, so your two hole cards plus 4 on the board). This means we have a 9/46 change to win the hand, or about 4:1 (20%). You would need to make sure the odds to win are greater than your odds to call for it to be +EV. In this case, calling $2 into a $10 pot would be correct, but calling $5 would not. DUCY?

Also, we use pot odds/draws to determine our betting when we want to give our opponent incorrect odds to call.

[Revolver123]

So using the concept of pot odds, if one is on a flush draw and the villain bets $2 into a $3 pot, why do some heroes raise to $8 on a flush draw? Isn't that a money sink?

[kb coolman]

At the smaller stakes, it very likely is a donk move. Way too many guys reward themselved emotionally for the times they made a horrible play but still hit their hand. Overall, they don't realize that they're losing money.

But you can't always assume it's a bad move. There are a lot of things happening at the table besides the cards hitting the board. It could be a bluff. It could be he has a stronger draw with overcards. It's spots like this where it is critical to take good notes and get a feel for opponent ranges.

[JKDS]

So the current pot is now 5 and hero raised to 8, for a total of 6 more to villain. Let p(A) be the probability of A occurring, then
Hero's equity = 5*p(villain folds) - 6*p(lose)
Since we expect to win the pot (5) everytime villain folds and lose 6 everytime villain calls, and we dont make our flush.
Assuming we want this to be a break even play, let our equity =0
then we have 0=5*p(fold) - 6*.64 since the odds we dont win if villain calls is 1-36% = .64 so we have
0= 5*p(fold) - 3.84
then for this to be a break even play, we need p(fold) to be
3.84=5p(fold)
p(fold)=.76

Thus, if we are facing a player that is likely to fold 76% of the time or more, we are making a winning play. Note that this calculation is only valid if that 8 dollar raise put us all in, or if we are IP so that we can see a free turn. If this is not the case, p(lose) becomes 1-.18=.82 and i dont think villain can fold enough to make this a winning play.

[Ragnar4]

So using the concept of pot odds, if one is on a flush draw and the villain bets $2 into a $3 pot, why do some heroes raise to $8 on a flush draw? Isn't that a money sink?

The raise throws the idea of pot odds out the window. Pot odds is simply a determination of whether or not you can call call a bet, while looking to hit an unmade hand, or if you have a marginal hand at the river, whether you think your good enough, often enough to make the call.

Example.
1) You have a flush draw, you're 18.9% to hit your flush on the turn card. There's 10 dollars in the pot. You know that the only way for you to win is by hitting your flush

A) You should call a bet of 1 dollar
B) You should not call a bet of 2 dollars.

You have a pair of Kings on the river on a relatively dry Board
A 9 7 2 2 r. You figgure that you're going to have the best hand 50% of the time here after the way the hand has played out. There is 250 dollars in the pot.

A) You should call a bet of 125 or less
B) You should not call a bet of anything more than 125.00.

Here's the trick, though, Pot odds are only one measure of your odds at the time. There are implied odds, which is to say, "Can I get enough money out of my opponent when I hit, to make this call worth while." If you can honestly answer yes. Then you could even justify calling a Pot Sized Bet as long as you figgured you could get 5X that PSB out of your opponent should you win.

You could also massage the odds, if your opponent loves to bet the flop but chickens out on the turn alot. You can effectively double your odds. If you see two streets for the price of one, you can call more liberally.

When you raise you're also factoring in Fold Equity. There's a chance that your opponent may fold. You can add that to the chance you'll win the hand.

There's a lot of math behind the raise, but it is NOT a function of pot odds per say, and really beyond my scope to truly go over it in any good faith.

[Cole24b]

You have to realize that not all players (especially in low stakes games) use any kind of math in their decisions. There will always be a donk drawing to 4 cards (around 8%) on the river even if you played a hand to a tee and sometimes they will hit. There is a really good explanation of pot odds as well as hand odds at tightpoker . com / poker_odds(Sorry I do not have ten posts yet so I cant give you a direct link) . To determine pot odds, it is important to first understand hand odds. Also, it goes a little into implied odds which can be tricky if you are new to it.

[mrhappy333]

http://www.tightpoker.com/poker_odds.html

the raise with a flush draw has to do not only with equity to make the best hand, but also fold equity