Intro to Pot Odds (How to Calculate) | Upswing Poker Level-Up #51

This article is a transcription of the Level-Up Podcast, hosted by Upswing VP Mike Brady with poker pro Gary Blackwood. You can watch or listen to the entire episode via the links above or read on if you prefer a written version.

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Let’s level up your poker strategy by covering a fundamental part of the game, pot odds. You’re about to learn how to quickly calculate pot odds, which will help you make more profitable decisions at the table. But first, we have to cover what pot odds are. This episode of Upswing Poker Level-Up was taken directly from the new Low Stakes Poker Crash Course in the Upswing Lab. We’re making it available to Level Up listeners because it’s an important topic and it provides a nice preview into what this course is all about. If you want to access the full Low Stakes course, head to upswingpoker.com and use coupon code LEVELUP to get $50 off the Upswing Lab. I’ll talk more about it at the end of this episode. I should note this episode will be easier to understand if you watch the video. First off, what are pot odds?

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This definition is straight from upswingpoker.com, pot odds are the ratio between the size of the total pot and the size of the bet that you’re facing. Keep in mind that the size of the total pot includes any bets made in the current round. For example, if there’s $200 in the pot and your opponent bets a hundred dollars, your pot odds are three-to-one because there was 200 in there. Your opponent bet a hundred, that’s 300 total. You have to call a hundred. The ratio is three-to-one. Pot odds are the mathematical foundation for calling situations in poker. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to figure out which plays are profitable and which are not. Let’s talk about how to calculate pot odds. There are a few different ways to do this. I’m about to share an easy and fast three-step process that you can actually do at the table in a reasonable amount of time. But I’ve got to explain something important first. As I mentioned a moment ago, pot odds are expressed as a ratio like two-to-one, three-to-one or three-to-two. But to make pot odds more useful in-game, you should get used to converting your pot odds to a percentage, three-to-one, for example, converts to 25%.

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That percentage is known as your price to call. Your price to call is how often you must win the pot in order for your call to break even. So if there’s $200 in the pot and your opponent bets $100 on the river, you are getting three-to-one and your price to call is 25%. That means you must have the best hand more than 25% of the time for that call to show a profit in the long run. If you run a quick equity calculation and your hand has 28% versus your opponent’s estimated range, that is a profitable call. If you don’t know how to convert a ratio to a percentage, don’t worry, it’s really easy. I’ll link a one-minute YouTube video below this that shows you how. With that out of the way, let’s get into that easy three-step process for using pot odds in-game to make more profitable decisions.

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Step one, calculate the final pot size if you were to call the current bet. Suppose your opponent bets $100 into a $300 pot on the river. That makes the total pot $400 and if you were to call that a hundred dollar bet, the final pot size would be $500. Let’s refer to that number as the final pot. Step number two, divide the size of the call by the size of the final pot. In this case, we divide that $100 bet that we’re facing by the $500 final pot. 100 divided by 500 or 100 over 500 equals 0.2. Step three, multiply by 100 to get the percentage. 0.2 when multiplied by a hundred equals 20, and that means your price to call in this situation on the river is 20%. That means that when you call, you need to win more than 20% of the time in order to profit by calling.

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So how should you use pot odds? What are some practical examples? Pot odds are a critical factor every time you face a bet or raise. I’m going to go over a few examples. Number one, you should use pot odds when you are facing a raise pre-flop, especially when you are closing the action in the big blind and you’re considering whether or not you should defend. Let’s say the action folds to the button in a cash game and they raise it up to three big blinds. The small blind folds and you look down at seven five suited in the big blind. In this case, you have to call two big blinds and if you call the final pot will be 6.5 big blinds. So we take the amount you have to call, two, and divide it by the final pot size, 6.5, and the result is about 0.31.

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Expressed as a percentage we just multiply that by a hundred and we get 31%. Now the question is does our seven five suited have at least 31% equity against that button player’s range? Because I’m a dinosaur who has been playing poker for over 15 years somehow, I’m going to use Poker Stove to figure this out. And I’m going to start by just typing in our hand, seven five suited. And now I’m going to pop open the range chart for the opponent and I’m going to estimate what they’re raising on the button. Now a typical button raising range in a cash game is about 42%. I’m just going to type in that 42% and then adjust this a little bit so it’s missing threes and twos. I think most people are going to play those hands. Honestly, the rest of this range looks fine. It’s about 43% of total hands.

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I’m just going to click okay and then run the equity calculation, and the result is seven five suited has about 38% equity against that button player’s range. That’s well above the 31% we needed, so this is probably a profitable call. I say probably because there are a few other factors that go into situations like this, which I’m going to cover in a few minutes. I will verify right now though, seven five suited against a three big blind button raise, it’s a profitable call. I’m going to close down Poker Stove for this next example. We don’t need it. Example number two is when you’re facing an all-in on the flop or turn and you’re holding a draw. Let’s say you’re playing a tournament and you’re somewhat short-stacked and you make it to the flop with six four suited. Six four of hearts to be exact.

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The flop comes jack of hearts, seven of hearts, two of diamonds, pretty good flop for you, you have a flush draw. You check over to your opponent and they go all-in for five and a half big blinds into a five and a half big blind pot. So a full pot sized all-in. Following our steps from earlier, we have to call 5.5 and should we call, there’s going to be a total of 16.5 big blinds in the middle. Our 5.5 potential call over that final pot of 16.5, equals 0.33. AKA, you need 33% equity in order to profitably call this all-in. So how often will you hit your flush, and is it at least 33% of the time? There’s a really useful rule for these types of situations. Whenever you think you know how many outs you have, I recommend using the rule of two and four.

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It’s not quite perfect, but it’s a really good approximation. Here’s a quick summary of the rule of two and four. When you are on the flop, multiply your number of outs by four and that is the likelihood you will hit one of your outs by the river. If you’re on the turn, you multiply your number of outs by two because you only have one chance to hit one of those outs. So in this case, we have nine cards that’ll give us a flush. Any of the remaining nine hearts will complete our flush, and we’re on the flop. So we multiply that nine by four. Nine times four is 36, which is more than that 33% equity that we needed to call. It is a little bit close, so you might want to run an equity calculation just to make sure against the exact range you might be up against it’s a profitable call.

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But in-game I would assume that this is a profitable call. We are about 36% to hit our flush. We only needed 33% to profitably call, so we would call in this scenario. Just to help cement this example, let’s change that two on the flop to a five. So now the flop is jack of hearts, seven of hearts, five of diamonds, which means we have an open-ended straight draw along with our flush draw. Now instead of having nine outs, we have 15 outs to hit our hand. By using the rule of two and four, we can multiply our number of outs 15 by four, and that comes out to 60% to hit our draw, and that is obviously well above the 33% we need, so this is a slam dunk call. This method is perfect when you’re facing an all-in because once you call the all-in, the action is over.

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You’re guaranteed to see the turn and river. You can also use it when you’re not facing an all-in, when you’re just facing a regular bet. Just keep in mind there are other things that go into that because sometimes your opponent will bet on the turn and maybe you’ll have to fold. Which means you won’t actually see the river. So the rule of two and four no longer works quite as well. It’s also possible that your opponent has a better draw. In this example maybe he has ace five of hearts. Now hitting a heart is no good for us. So there are limitations to using the rule of two and four and using pot odds to figure out if you can call with a draw, but it’s a really good starting point and I highly recommend getting used to doing this if you’ve never thought about things like this before.

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Example number three of when to use pot odds is when you’re facing a bet on the river and you’re considering whether or not you should call with a hand that seems close. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to skip straight to the river for this one. Let’s say you’ve got pocket jacks and the flop is queen of spades, seven of spades, five of diamonds. The turn is the two of clubs and the river is the two of diamonds. So there’s one overcard to worry about. If your opponent has a queen, they have your pocket jacks beat, or of course they could have a hand like a set; pocket sevens or pocket twos. But there was a flush draw on the flop and that flush draw missed. You check to your opponent and they go for a bet of let’s say 10 big blinds into a 15 big blind pot.

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We have to call 10 big blinds and the final pot is 35 big blinds. 10 divided by 35 equals about a 29% price to call in this scenario. So we need to be good with our pocket jacks at least 29% of the time to call profitably in this scenario. But do we have at least 29% equity? Let’s put in our pocket jacks into Poker Stove and then type in the specific board. I’ve plugged our hand pocket jacks and the board into Poker Stove and now I’m going to put in a quick estimation of what I think this player’s range is. At first I’m going to be really pessimistic about this player’s range. In other words, I’m going to assume they have mostly strong hands and will very rarely have a bluff. I’ve given this player a pair of queens with a jack kicker or better, so ace queen, king queen, or queen jack, and I’ve given him a handful of missed flush draws like king jack of spades and jack 10 of spades.

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I’ve also included a set of sevens and a set of fives in the range, and then as far as bluffs go, I’ve given him just a handful of missed flush draws. King jack suited, jack ten of spades, ten nine of spades, and all of the different nine eight combinations for a missed straight draw. And when I run this equity calculation against this range, pocket jacks has just 16.2% equity. That’s well under the 29% we need to call. So if this range is accurate, we have an easy fold here with our pocket jacks based on our pot odds. Now like I said, this is a really pessimistic range. It’s possible our opponent is bluffing far more often than this, so I’m going to try one more range that assumes they have a lot more missed flush draws and we can see the difference. Now I’ve given this player a lot more potential bluffs in the form of missed flush draws.

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I’ve included a ton of different ace high flush draws and a few king high flush draws and we could see the difference in equity. Now our pocket jacks has 32.7% equity against this estimated range, so if this is the range our opponent has in this spot, we have a profitable call. We have a great article over on upswingpoker.com called ‘How to Analyze Your Poker Hands Effectively in Five Minutes’, and it shows you basically exactly this process that I just went through where you start by recording your hands, picking tough spots, and then you run the numbers by first analyzing against the optimist range, that’s kind of the second range I did there where you put in almost all of the possible bluffs. Then you also do the pessimistic range, which is the first one we did where there were very few bluffs. And then you also do the quote realist range, which is where you try to come up with the most accurate range that the opponent can have.

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The article goes on to explain how you can use this process to really come to solid conclusions on whether a call is profitable or not profitable. Now that we’ve went over a few examples, I want to talk about how pot odds can potentially lead you down a losing path. They can be kind of misleading in certain scenarios and it’s because they simply don’t factor in everything at play. There are a number of situations where it might seem like your hand has enough equity to call. You might have more raw equity as we say, than your price to call would require. So maybe you need 29% equity to profitably call and you run the numbers and you have 30%. But there could be some other things at play and I want to talk about those in a couple examples really quick. One extreme example is when you’re defending your big blind multi-way, especially with kind of trashy offsuit hands,. Let’s say someone raises to three big blinds and then four people call.

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Suppose you look down at ace two offsuit in the big blind and then you figure out your price to call. You do the three-step process that we talked about earlier and you discover that you need about 13% equity to profitably call in this scenario. And you again look at your ace two off suit and you think, “Hmm, I have an ace, I only need 13% equity to call in this scenario, this has to be an easy call. How can I not call when I’m getting such an amazing price?” It’s really easy to get sucked in when your price to call is so low like this. If you play live poker, you’re going to see a lot of your opponents make this exact mistake, and they may even comment while making the call that they’re getting such amazing pot odds and how can they fold. But in this case, there’s a real reason to fold.

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The first reason is simply that ace two offsuit against four other players is really not that great. If we run a quick equity calculation, we’re going to find that it doesn’t have that much equity. But perhaps more importantly, you won’t necessarily realize all that equity with your ace two offsuit. You’re not always going to see the flop, turn, and river. Equity realization is a really important concept that I’m going to cover in a video or two here in the Upswing Lab. If you’re watching or listening to this as a podcast, you can just Google “equity realization poker” and you’ll find the Upswing Poker article about this and you can learn a little bit more about equity realization. But the key takeaway here is, don’t be seduced by really good pot odds in multi-way pots, especially when you’re holding a disconnected offsuit hand. They just don’t play well enough.

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Another example is when you’re facing a c-bet on the flop with a hand that might be the best hand right now, but has really poor playability on future streets. An example of this might be in a tournament, let’s say you defend your big blind with queen seven offsuit against the button, and the flop comes jack three three rainbow, all different suits. You check to your opponent and they bet small. In this spot, you’re going to be getting decent pot odds if they bet small. You might only need to win the pot 20-25% of the time to break even, and you might look at your hand queen high, jack three three flop, it’s kind of hard to hit that. If your opponent doesn’t have ace or king high or a pair in their hand, you have the best hand here. And you might think, “Okay, I’m getting good pot odds, I might have the best hand, let’s call.”

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The problem is once again, you won’t realize enough equity with this hand. You have to hit exactly a queen to be happy with your hand on the turn. I guess a seven wouldn’t be too bad either. But not too many good things can happen on the turn and river for you, and therefore maybe you should just get out of the way on the flop even though your pot odds and your hand kind of make it seem like you should maybe call. Keep an eye out for situations like this where you have a hand that’s going to have really poor playability on future streets and don’t get sucked in just because your pot odds are decent with hands like that. The final thing I want to cover really quickly, and I’m just going to list a few things here, is what other factors need to be considered alongside pot odds?

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If you’re not watching this in the Upswing Lab right now, I highly recommend joining over on upswingpoker.com. You can use coupon code LEVELUP to get $50 off and watch this entire low stakes course made by myself, Gary Blackwood, and Tim Jenkins. This entire thing that we’re making is meant to help players who just want to learn the basics in a simple, digestible way, and get to the tables and be competitive. That’s what this course is all about. So again, upswingpoker.com, use coupon code LEVELUP to get $50 off and check out the Low Stakes Live Course. Now we’re releasing this course in three parts over the course of three months, I hope to see you in there. By the way, you also get access to a private Discord community, a private Facebook, and literally a hundred plus other lessons along with preflop charts that will help you upgrade your skills.

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By the way, the Lab and everything else on Upswing Poker is 25% off right now during our biggest sale of the year. We extended it for Cyber Week, so you have until this upcoming Monday, December 9th to get 25% off the lab, so you can access this Low Stakes Launchpad course that we just released or any other premium course or tool over on upswingpoker.com. So go head over there, take advantage of that now. So anyway, here’s a list of the other important factors to consider with pot odds, and if I’m missing any, please leave a comment and let me know, but these are really going to be the key ones. You need to consider your equity realization,I’ve already talked about that at-length. You need to consider your implied odds or your reverse implied odds, and you also need to keep your range competitive for future streets.

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It’s really important that by the time you reach the turn and the river where the pot is really big, that your range is competitive with your opponents. You don’t have too many junky hands where you’re always going to have to fold like that queen seven on a jack three three board. If you’re unfamiliar with any of those concepts, just give ’em a Google, we probably have an Upswing Poker article about it, or you could just join the Upswing Lab and watch that low stakes course. Thank you for watching and if you’re already in the course, let’s go ahead and move on to the next video.