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Poker Odds

Sometimes balls and intuition are all it takes to beat your buddies on poker night, but if you're serious about taking your poker game to the next level then you're also going to have to learn some math. Odds (and the ability to calculate them quickly) are at the heart of any good poker strategy. Odds determine the best starting hands in games like Texas Hold'em and Omaha; odds also determine the strength of your hand later in the game. Odds can even be used to determine when and how much you should bet. In this article, we're going to explore three important byproducts of poker odds: the best starting hands, outs and pot odds.

Best Starting Hands

Starting hand lists are all over the web, so we won't waste your time by reposting one here. Chances are you've already got your ten favorite starting hands memorized anyway. Beginners might wonder why high pairs are always at the top of the list. That's simple. A pair of Aces is the best two-card hand a player can get; it's a made hand, which means that you've already got a combination. You don't have to worry about odds with a starting hand like that because you know at that point in the game that you have your opponents beat. In fact, more than half of all hands – regardless of which poker game you're playing – are won with a single pair. Those are some pretty good odds! Of course the farther a hand progresses the less your pocket pair is worth and the more valuable high suited connectors become because of the additional outs they offer.

Outs

In poker, “outs” are essentially the number of chances you have of improving your hand. Those chances are directly tied to the cards left in the deck. For example, if you are holding pocket Aces at the beginning of the hand, then you're hoping for more Aces. In other words, you've got only two outs. At a table with just three people, the deck would have 46 cards left going into the flop. Therefore your odds of improving your current hand are 2 in 46 or 1 in 23. This is why suited connectors outpace pairs as the hand progresses – because in the same scenario going into the flop you've hypothetically got as many as 10 outs toward a flush. Your chances of improving your hand are five times better than a player's with pocket pairs. That's why it's important to bet very aggressively early on when you have pocket pairs.

Pot Odds

Pot odds are all about risk vs gain. Put simply, pot odds weigh what's currently in the pot against what you'll have to wager to continue competing for it. For example, if the pot is currently at $10 and you have to call $1 to stay in the hand then the pot odds are 10:1. Easy enough right? To make pot odds work for you, you've also got to consider your odds of getting the winning hand and compare the two figures. This is called expected value. For example, if you've got four cards toward the flush going into the river, and there are 40 cards left in the deck, you hypothetically have as many as eight outs. Therefore, your odds of drawing the desired hand are 40:8 or 5:1. Since the implied odds are better than the pot odds, this is a positive expectation scenario, meaning that it's a good call.

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