Poker Pot Odds

In Texas Holdem, you commonly use outs and pot odds the most. This is also the starting point for those who want to learn about poker odds. To those out there who aren’t good at counting, better get good because that is how it's done.

At this point it's only simple division. The numerator will be the number of outs you have. The denominator is the number of cards left that we haven't seen. The result will be the percentage chance of making one of those outs. Therefore, the most math you'll be doing will be dividing small numbers by 50 (pre-flop), 47 (after the flop), or 46 (after the turn).

Before we move on, one thing needs to be clarify. A lot of you might wonder why we never factor the opponents' cards or the burn cards when figuring out how many cards are left. The reason is that we only consider "unseen cards.

If you saw what the burn cards were, or an opponent showed you his hand, you would know that those cards are not going to be drawn and could use that. We typically do not know what they have, so we don't even think about it when talking about odds.

For instance, take a standard deck of 52 cards, remove 2 Aces and burn 25 of them. If you drew the next card, what are the chances of it being an Ace? It would be 2/50 (2 Aces left out of 50 unseen cards). It would NOT be 2/25 just because you burned half the deck.