If you’ve played poker for any amount of time or even just watched it on TV, you’ve heard the term “pot odds.” It’s an often misunderstood concept and rarely used properly by the beginning player. Myself, I’ve read several books on poker, each of which explaining pot odds in their own way. But, I’m going to attempt explain pot odds in easily understood terms so that a player of any level can start using them right away.

Pot odds are defined as the ratio of the current size of the pot to the bet that you must call.

For example: The pot stands at $400. Your heads up after the flop and the turn. The player in early position bets $100. You must call $100 to win $500. Your pot odds are 100/500 or 1/5.

It gets more complicated when you have players left to act behind you and other factors, but pot odds is a basic tool that can help you decide whether to call or fold.

Okay… so, let’s talk about how you apply pot odds to your hand. Say you have:

The board on fourth street is:

You can obviously see that you have inside straight draw. Any 6 will make you a straight. So you have 4 outs. We’ll review counting outs in another post.

You use your number of outs to figure out your drawing odds. You have seen six cards and have 46 cards that are unseen (you use this calculation regardless of how many were in the hand and folded previously). So, you have 4/46 to make your hand, which you assume will be a winner. Or to break it down, 1/(11.5 - 1) = 1/10.5¹.

Now we simply put the two together. You have 1/5 pot odds. Your drawing odds are 1/10.5. In this case, you should fold.

You must have better pot odds than drawing odds to call. It breaks down like this. You will win this hand, let’s say every 1 out of 10 times (rounding down). So, 1 time you will win $500 and 9 times you will lose $100 (your call amount) for a total of $900. So your expected loss is $400! So therefore, clearly, this is not the right play. In fact, anything less than break even pot odds vs drawing odds is an incorrect play, from a technical stand point.

So, in a nutshell… that’s pot odds. A VERY simplified version of pot odds. This does not take in to account several factors² and make several assumptions³. I will cover the more advanced versions of counting odds in later sections… but for now, that should be enough to get you going and will be especially helpful in small stakes games, where play is generally looser⁴.

Here’s a table. I’m still trying to memorize it and you probably should try to.

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If you notice that after about 8 outs, the break even pot odds become so small that you can call virtually ANY bet on fourth street.

1. Subtracting 1 converts the result to odds form. [back]
2. Like how your opponents would react to a raise, for instance. [back]
3. For one, that a bigger straight isn’t held by an opponent and two, that there will be no more betting on the river.[back]
4. Also, in games where an opponent *does* understand pot odds, you can price a draw out of a pot. [back]

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