Math makes my brain hurt, and even moreso in the middle of a live hand of poker. I need some good mental shortcuts for turning outs into a percentage that my feeble math mind can cope with. One article says to multiply your outs by two then add two to that sum. This will give you your approximate outs to make your hand on the turn. To get your percentage for the river, just add two to your outs. That’s all well and good for the turn and river, but what about calculating odds for pre-flop hands? How do you calculate runner-runner?
I’m going to use this as an opportunity to suggest that you don’t bother to do this. Of all the important things to be thinking about at the poker table, knowing the exact percentages of your ‘outs’ is not in the top 10.
You should know things like this - the general playability of hands with 4 outs (gutshot straights, etc), the playability of hands with 8 or 9 outs (open-ended straits, four flushes), and that’s about it. Pot-odds errors on the margins are tiny. If you call for a gutshot with one bet short in the pot, it’s an error of a tiny fraction of a bet.
Far more important is learning pre-flop hand selection, and learning to read other players. And most importantly, ‘situational awareness’. That means always have a picture in your mind of what the other players might have, what their mental states are, etc. And that’s why I say you should not focus so much of your energy on exact percentages.
Also, knowing the exact percentages is ‘false accuracy’. Like measuring something with a yardstick and writing the answer down to four decimal places. The fact is, you can never know exactly how good your hand is. Poker is played in a cloud of indeterminacy - there’s all kinds of information you are missing. Playing the odds is tempting because it allows you to focus on the one piece of information you can calculate. But the other stuff is more important.
For example, what are my odds of winning if I have 78s, and the flop is 8s9sQc?
One way to calculate that would be to do the raw math. You have 9 outs to hit a flush, plus another 6 outs to hit the straight without hitting the flush. Do the math on that, and you’ll find that you’re going to make one of those two hands quite often.
But so what? Does that mean it’s a good hand? Does the 10 really improve your hand? Now anyone with a jack has you beat. Is your small flush going to be good? Does anyone already have a set, meaning that you can still lose if you make your hand and the board pairs? Did you notice the guy in seat 9 roll his eyes when the spades landed? If so, does that mean you should assume he threw away 2 spades and you should adjust your odds accordingly?
Most importantly, “Can I win this pot even without hitting my hand if I take control now? Or am I just going to walk into a raise if I semi-bluff bet?”
I see too many new poker players think that math is the be-all and end-all of the game. And for understandable reasons - poker appeals to us math geeks and computer nerds, so we feel at home with it. And the math is a nice, concrete thing to wrap your head around. It also makes you feel like a pro if you can rattle off the odds for any combination of cards to come, and you can impress the babes.
You can win loose, low limit games by playing the odds. You won’t be able to beat the tougher games until you learn to play the players. And that’s much, much harder. I’ve seen far too many whiz-kids sitting there calculating their odds for a call after a player bets, totally missing the fact that the opponent’s betting pattern suggests he has nothing at all.
Preflop you obviously don’t know what your opponent has, so you need to put him or her on a range and then see where you stand. Keep in mind that an underpair is a 4-1 dog to an overpair, a dominated hand (say your AQo to his AKo) is usually a 3-1 dog and that your 2 live cards (say J8o) are only a 3-2 dog to AKo. I’m sure you already know that any pair is a slight favorite over two overcards preflop.
As for postflop, I find that the “rule of 13” works pretty well. This applies to any number of outs between 3 and 10. 3 outs means you are a 10-1 dog, 4 outs makes you a 9-1 dog, 5 outs means you are an 8-1 dog, etc. See the chart below and notice that the sum of each row equals 13.
Outs / Odds (to 1)
3 10
4 9
5 8
6 7
7 6
8 (straight draw) 5
9 (flush draw) 4
10 3
I hope this helps.
Thanks guys. I’d like to be able to call myself an above average, solid player. My pre-flop selection is solid, and I most often go in with the best of it. I make occassional semi-bluffs and continuation bets against passive players which works well. I guess you could catagorize me as a “rock,” but I’m learning more and more on how to make aggressiveness work when the opportunity arises.
Anyway, I keep hearing on poker shows how all the “real” players know the math up and down and can calculate the odds with idiot savant speed. I know that four to the flush and open ended are about 1/3 odds, but that’s about it. The way I calculate pot odds is whether or not the pot “looks big enough” for a flush or straight draw. Are knowing the details on outs and percentages really not that big of a deal?
The general rule I’ve always heard to ballpark it (and I don’t really play much poker) is Outs Times Four after the flop, and Outs Times Two on the Turn for the percentages.
If you can do it without affecting any other part of your game, then it’s an obvious way to gain a marginal improvement. But very few players can do that, especially when there is time pressure involved.
A better skill than knowing the exact odds would be knowing how likely you are to get paid off if you hit your hand, or even get in a raise. If the pot is smallish, your estimation of that likelihood alone is more important than knowing whether you have a 21% chance or a 25% chance to win.
I think it’s important to know the math, so that you have a better understanding of the game and the forces at play. Just don’t use the math with that degree of precision during a game, unless you can do it effortlessly. Also note that calculating odds is often a tell. If I see someone studying the pot in a limit game, I’m more likely to put him on a draw. Not much need to calculate pot odds if you’ve already got what you think is the best hand. (In no limit this is not the case - with a made hand you want to know the size of the pot so you know what kind of ‘price’ you want the other opponent to pay to draw to his).
Anyway, getting back to the precise percentages… You can’t answer that question without knowing what the other players have. So you can’t calculate it. You can calculate the odds of hitting your draw, but you still have to beat the other players. And you also don’t know how many outs you have. For example, is a runner-runner 2 pair an out for your hand? Or will it make someone a bigger hand? What if someone else is on a bigger draw? etc.
The precise percentages are also more useful in heads-up poker. For one thing, because you have to play almost every hand, it’s very useful to understand the power ranking of your hand against any other 2 random cards. But in a multi-way pot, you’ve got only the foggiest of notions of what kind of hands you are up against, which makes calculating the pot odds you need very error-prone. So like I said, learning exact percentages is applying the illusion of a precision that really doesn’t exist.