Most people don’t like maths. So chances are, you’re not too keen on it either. But if you want to win at poker, you’ll need to be familiar with at least some basic maths.
Don’t worry though, it’s all pretty straightforward stuff. Practise it a bit, and you’ll be way ahead of all those players who never bothered.
Winning
Winning poker isn’t about short-term results. It’s all about the long run. Over time, you’ll suffer some big losses but you’ll also benefit from some chunky wins. In the end, the cards even out and if you’ve been making profitable decisions all along, you’ll be a winner. Let’s use a simple example to illustrate this.
Say we hold two aces and go all-in pre-flop against a pair of kings. Sure, we will lose the hand sometimes. But that shouldn’t bother us. If we run this scenario often enough, we will end up with a profit.
Of course, most situations in poker aren’t as clear-cut as aces versus kings. To find out which plays are profitable and which aren't, we’ll need to use some basic maths.
The Basics
The maths behind any poker problem boil down to two factors:
- your chances of winning the hand
and
- the amount of money you stand to win versus the amount you stand to lose.
To find out if a situation is profitable or not, we need to compare these two factors. We can do this in three steps:
1. Calculate the pot-odds
2. Calculate the odds of winning the hand
3. Compare the pot-odds to our hand-odds
If you don't understand some of the jargon we've used so far, don't worry. We're going to explain it now.
Pot odds
Getting to grips with pot odds is really important if you want to make money at poker.
To calculate the pot odds, we compare the amount of money that is currently in the pot to the amount of money we need to put in to make a call.
Let’s look at an example:
On the flop, we’re playing against one opponent. The pot is $2,000 and our opponent bets $1000. So what are the pot odds?
The pot prior to this round of betting was $2,000. Our opponent now bets $1,000 – making the pot $3,000. We need to put in $1,000 to make the call.
So, we compare the pot ($3,000) to the amount required for the call ($1,000): $3,000/$1,000.
The pot odds in this situation are 3/1.
But just knowing the pot-odds isn’t enough to figure out if a situation is profitable or not. We will also need to calculate our odds of winning the hand. Find out how to do that in our next article....
