You’ve seen the movies and heard the news stories about players winning life changing sums at the casinos. It’s not just a James Bond fantasy, there’s players out there winning millions of Euros playing jackpot slot games. Fortunate to say the least, but have you ever wondered the method of giving yourself the best chance of victory at a casino? Well, you should stick to strategy, and that typically means card games. Beyond the actual gameplay of cards, whether your’e playing at an online casino or live at the casino, there is a specific strategy used in order to determine whether you should call or not, sometimes even regardless of the strength of your hand. These are instances in which you have to determine that making the call would be deemed sound in a mathematical sense.

 

For example (and this is an exaggerated one), say you’re playing a cash game and there is $50 in the pot. The river card has yet to come out and you’re the last to act with a call of only $1. As of right now your only chance in winning the hand consists on hitting your gut shot straight. Despite there being several other callers in the hand, you can’t justify folding because a mere $1 because calling give you the possibility to rake in $50, a huge upside. After calling, the river card comes out and there is that gut shot you were hoping for. This is what professional card players call pot odds.

 

Pot odds is the mathematical concept of cards that aids in the decision making. The practice is based on determining if you would either make or lose money if you were to make the same call every single time, which is called expected value. Configuring your expected value is a two-step process where you weight out the situation of the hand in tandem with calculating the odds of hitting your draw.

 

The Hand

Referring back to the original example, the first part in determining your pot odds is looking at the hand’s situation. In our hyperbolic example we have a $1 call to a $50 pot. Determining pot odds requires you to switch these numbers into a ratio, so it would convert to 50:1. This formula would follow for any situation as: pot size:call.

 

Hitting Your Draw

After figuring your pot odds, you weigh this number to the chances of hitting your draw. The hardest part of understanding and utilizing pot odds is knowing the odds of hitting any specific draw, which may take some time to memorize. With our example you are looking for a gut shot straight with a call of $1 on the turn for a $50 pot. Your pot odds are 50:1, and the chances of hitting a gut shot is 5:1, meaning that for every 6 times you are in that situation, you will hit your gut shot once, giving you roughly a 17% chance of hitting.

 

Going back to our example, a just time to fold the hand would be if the pot size:call ratio is beyond 50:10, exceeding the odds of hitting your gut shot. Any bet that is less than $10 should be called based on the statistics of pot odds.

 

Using this method can help take the stress off of seemingly difficult calls, especially when you begin to recognize that some players tend to bet much less than this giving you a chance to create some huge opportunities for yourself at the table.