Understanding Poker Odds

Although the wily old fox in your local casino or cardroom would have you believe that poker is simply a battle of wits, and the players who make the best reads are the ones who go home with all the chips, you simply cannot get away from the fact that the game is based on mathematics, and as a result poker odds and probability play a massive part in a winning player's arsenal.

On the surface poker odds may seem a little daunting or even scary to some, but poker odds do not need to be any of these things as they are actually quite easy to figure out with some basic mathematical skills or a poker odds calculator. The poker odds and probabilities of many common scenarios are often best to just commit to memory, such as the poker odds of being dealt a pocket pair as your hole cards is 16:1 whilst the poker odds of being dealt a pair of aces is 220:1. Likewise, you will flop a set 8.3:1 times when you have a pocket pair, and the poker odds of making a flush on river when the board contains two flushed cards and you hold two are 4.2:1. The maths behind these poker odds is relatively simply but for another article.

Using a poker odds calculator to improve your game

The most important aspect of poker odds are pot odds, that is the odds the pot is offering you on your money. Again the maths behind these poker odds is very simple but if you do struggle you could use a poker odds calculator. Most poker odds calculators are free too which is an added bonus. In an overly simplified example, the pot contains $10 and it costs you $1 to call therefore the pot is offering you 10:1. Now where a poker odds calculator comes into its own is when it can tell you if making the call will be profitable, which it will always be if the pot odds are greater than the poker odds of making your hand. Another simplified example shows us being on the turn with a pot size of $10 and it costs us $1 to call, therefore out pot odds are 10:1. We are drawing to a flush and estimate that we need to make out flush in order to win. If we miss our flush we will fold and invest no more money into the pot. The poker odds calculator says the odds of making our flush on the next card are approximately 4:1 so because the pot odds are greater than the odds of making our hand we should call as we profit in the long run, even we do not win this particular hand.

Another area where a poker odds calculator will come into its own is when you are attempting to figure out how your hand fairs against another hand or range of hands. Most people commit to memory the poker odds of typical scenarios, such as how often aces will beat kings, so do not need to use a poker odds calculator. However, there are very few who have the brain power to calculate how, say a pair of queens will fair in an all in situation against someone who could be holding a pair of tens or better. However, punching this information into the great, free poker odds calculator called Poker Stove shows that this is as close to a 50/50 situation, as you can get as the poker odds calculator has instantly played more than 256 million games and queens won 50.013% of the hands. Poker odds calculators are powerful tools indeed!

Poker odds calculators can be a very useful tool to learn how to use, as these poker odds calculators can help you instantly recognise when a situation is profitable or not, plus using a poker odds calculator can help you realise how strong, or weak some hands actually are.