Odds on opponents betting more cash

Your opponent's action can turn a seemingly unprofitable situation for you into a profitable one. Here's how to figure out the odds of your opponent helping you.

In the last "maths" article, we looked at Expected Value or EV. Now we're going to the next step, which is to look at Implied Odds. This will tell us the odds on whether an opponent can turn your losing situation into a winning situation.

Let's look at an example:

Our cards are: 7♥ 8♥

The board cards are: Ace♠ 9♥ 3♥

The pot is $3000 and our opponent bets $1500.

Our pot odds are 3/1, and we know our odds of hitting the flush on the turn are approximately 4/1. Since the pot odds are smaller than the odds of hitting our flush, we'd have to say this is a situation with negative EV and we'd have to fold.

But do we really? This is where implied odds come into play.

Implied odds indicate the amount we expect to win after we hit our draw (i.e get a flush.) So while calling in this situation may not be profitable right now, we can extract more money from our opponent on the turn and/or river if we do hit our hand. That could then make up for the money we're losing right now when we call.

In this situation, we need to extract another $1,500 from our opponent on the turn or river to break even on our call after the flop. 

Unfortunately, there is no way to calculate the amount we stand to win if we do hit our hand. So how do we decide if the implied odds justify making a call with negative expectation? We can use a couple of guidelines. 

Guidelines

First of all, we need to make sure our opponent has plenty of chips left for us to win. If the money he has left isn’t enough to make up for the negative EV we’re getting on our call here, there is no point in calling. When an opponent moves all-in, for example, he has no more chips left for us to win later, so there are no implied odds. 

Even if our opponent has chips left to play with, he may not choose to bet. We need to be pretty certain that our opponent is going to put more money in the pot when we do hit our hand.

The better disguised our hand, the more likely our opponent will pay us some more money. In general, flushes are rather obvious, so don’t count on extracting too much after you hit. A straight or three-of-a-kind is more likely to be concealed.

Secondly, we need to know a thing or two about your opponent. Is he the kind of player who shuts down when an obvious draw comes on the board? Or is he always reluctant to fold if he has a top pair?

Be careful when using implied odds to justify a call with negative EV. If you can’t get an opponent to pay you off sufficiently, you may win the pot but still be losing money in the long-run.

Brain overload 

We've covered a lot of ground in these articles on poker and maths so don't worry if you feel you haven't fully digested everything. There's no shame in going back to the beginning of the series and reading it all over again.

The other problem isyou may feel you won't be able to do the calculations quickly enough when you're playing. If that's the case, worry not! There are some great online tools out there that will do the calculations for you. Find out more in Free tools for calculating odds.  It's the next article in our poker journey.