What Is Pot Odds? And How To Win At Poker Using It

Have you ever wondered what poker players mean when they throw around words like: “pot odds,” or “calculating pot odds” or even “implied odds”?

If so, then you’re in luck.

In this article, I’m going to explain to you exactly what pot odd is and how you can use it to win money playing poker.

Why You Should Know How To Calculate Pot Odds

Once you learn about what pot odd is and how to use it when playing poker, you’ll have a huge advance over your poker opponents.

You’ll know exactly when you should chase a flush/straight draw and when you should fold it.

You’ll be able to spot situations that will win you money and avoid situations that will cause you to lose money.

Interested yet? Good. Let’s get started.

So What Is Poker Pot Odds?

Pot odds is simply a way to measure risk and reward.

For example, let’s imagine that you are playing Texas Holdem poker. You have Ace King of clubs and there are two clubs on the board. There is $100 in the pot and your opponent bets $10 into you. This means that there are now $120 in the pot and you have to call $20.

4 out of the 5 community cards have already been turned over, so you only have one more chance to make your flush. Assuming that your opponent has the best hand and you need to make a flush in order to win, should you call?

Tough question, huh?

Well, to answer this question, you need two piece of information. The first is the odds that you will make your flush. And the second piece of information is how much pot odds you are getting. Both odds can be easily calculated.

How To Calculate Pot Odds

Calculating poker hand odds is a topic onto itself, so I won’t go into details about it here. For now, just take my word for it that the odds of you making your flush with one card to come is 4 to 1 (it’s actually 4.11 to 1, but let’s just keep it simple.) That means that for every 4 times you miss your flush, you will hit it one time.

Another way of saying this is that for every 5 attempts, you will succeed in making your flush once or 20% of the time.

Now that you know your chances of success, it’s time to compare it to your pot odds. In this case, there are $120 in the pot and you need to call $20. This basically means that in order to win that $120 you must risk $20. (Obviously if we make the flush, we can potentially win more than $120 by betting on the river, but let’s just ignore that fact for now and keep it simple.)

Since the amount you stand to win ($120) is six times larger than the amount you must risk ($20), we would say that you pot odds is 6 to 1. For every dollar that you risk, you stand to win six dollars. So as you can see, the higher your pot odds, the better.

So now that we have these two pieces of information, let’s piece them together and figure out if we should call this bet or not.

Since our odds of making a flush is 4 to 1, this means that we will lose 4 times and win 1 time. Each time we lose, we will lose $20. This will put our total lost at $80 ($20 x 4).

Each time we win, however, we will win $120. This will put our total win at $120 ($120 x 1).

So after all is said and done, we are left with a profit of $40. So by calling this bet, we will make a profit of $40, therefore this is a good call.

Now if your opponent had bet $100 into you instead of $20. This would chance the pot odds that we are getting and thus would change our decision.

In that case, we would have to risk $100 to win $200 (the $100 in the pot plus his $100 bet). Our total lost would be $400 ($100 x 4) and our total gain would be $200 ($200 x 1).

So in this case, a call would actually cause us to lose $200.

As you can see, knowing how to calculate and use pot odds in poker is an extremely useful skill. If you want to be able to win at poker, you must be able to calculate odds while playing.

Don’t worry. This might sound really hard, but it’s really not. I do it all the time when I’m playing poker and I don’t even notice it. Just practice for a while and you’ll be amazed at how easy it is become a human pot odds calculator.

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