POKER CARD GAME ODDS GUIDE

When you are playing poker or any card game, knowledge about the odds is often vital to a player’s success. What follows is a rough guide to odds calculations which will help any aspiring professional poker player. The majority of the tips and advice focus around the most popular type of poker, Texas Hold’em, but each tip can be adapted to help players of other types of poker and card games, such as Omaha. We hope this guide helps you to wipe all the tables clean in your home and online tournaments!

It is necessary to distinguish between hand odds and pot odds. Hand odds are your chances of making a hand in Texas Hold'em poker whereas pot odds just means the ratio of the amount of money in the pot to how much money it costs to call. Remember, this is only a guide to odds for those just beginning to think about the maths involved in this exciting card game.

Hand Odds Guide

Firstly, you must calculate how many outs you have during a hand of poker before you can work out the odds. Each out is a card left in the deck which will help you complete your five card poker hand. So if you held two diamonds and two appeared on the flop, as there are 13 diamonds in the deck altogether, there are 9 remaining diamonds for your flush (9 outs). Even if someone else is holding a diamond, you would never know that and so you must assume that if you cannot see them on the board or in your hand, the remaining diamonds must be available to all poker players at the table.

Remember not to over-count your outs in poker. Say you had in your hand 5? 6?, and the flop reads 7? 8? K?. Here you have a flush draw AND an open-ended straight draw. There are 9 remaining diamonds AND any 9 or 4 will complete a straight. So there seems to be 9+8 outs (17). However, one of the 9s and one of the 4s will also be a diamond and therefore will already have been counted as part of the 9 diamonds so there are in fact 15 outs.

Once you have your number of outs at the poker table, a simple guide to calculating hand odds is as follows. After the flop has come out, before the turn, multiply the number of outs by 4 and this will give you the odds of hitting the poker hand you are after (it is then up to you to ensure that this hand gives you the best hand at the poker table, the ‘nuts’). Before the river (after the turn), the number of outs must be multiplied by 2. So with 15 outs after the flop, the odds of hitting the flush or straight is 15x4=60%. If you miss on the turn, this figure halves to 30%. These figures are pretty accurate but remember, this method is only a guide to odds calculations. To work out the odds more accurately, a much more complex sum is involved!

Pot Odds Guide
To complete this rough guide to poker odds, we must look at pot odds. If there are 100 chips in the pot and it will cost you 5 to call, you must win the hand 1 out of 21 times to break even. The cost of playing 21 times is 21x5=105 chips, but one win will get you 105 chips back (100 in the pot plus your 5 chip call).
If your poker hand odds are better than 1/21, you will be making a profit in the long run by playing the poker hand. Say the pot had £10 in it and your call would cost £5 and you were holding a flush draw before the turn. Your poker hand odds are roughly 1/3 (36%) and to break even you would have to win 1/3 times. Calling would mean you moreorless break even in the long run. If you missed the turn, you would only have hand odds of 18% before the river. So calling here would create long run losses.
We hope this poker card game odds guide improves your game, whether you are playing at the World Series of Poker or simply at home for a bit of fun!