Question about pot odds and when to call?

Question

i have been reading about pot odds and odds of making your hand and when to call or not. i thought i read that you should call when the pot odds are better than the odds of making your hand..

now i just read it's just the opposite..

which is the right way? could you give me an example of this using a hand maybe..

Answer 1

the second way is correct. if there are better odds of you making a good hand then there are of somebody winning with what is on the table you should play it.

e.g. pocket cards Kd 10d

Flop shows 3d 4d Qs

what you were reading about is saying that here you have a better chance of making a flush than sombody winning with trip queens. so you play the hand.

Answer 2

If you win the hand one in three times and it's six times your bet here's what happens.  Say the bet is one chip:

W 6

L 1

L 1

So the net result is that you win 4 chips for every 3 times you bet.  So if the pot odds are equal or greater than the odds of winning the hand then it's in your favor.

It's not quite that simple of course but this is a good starting point to get the grasp of the concept.  You also need to look at what may happen downstream in terms of what other players yet to act may do.  There may be a player or two who may call as well, increasing the pot odds of this round for you.  There also may be someone who may raise and in this case it may end up reducing the odds, since players may fold and you will have to contribute more money to stay in the hand.  If it's no limit, depending on the size of the bet it may no longer be favorable for you to stay in the hand, although if it's a maniac then it might be more favorable, because if you hit you can usually make more money.

This brings us to the other concept, implied pot odds, which means that if you hit there's more money to be made and thus your profit will be higher.  You can have a pretty good idea of this by trying to predict the action that will follow in the next round or rounds but we won't get into too much detail here and just use a rule of thumb like what's happened so far will happen again.  For instance say you've got a draw where it's 1 in 7 to win and the pot odds are 1 in 4 on the flop.  There's the bettor and 2 callers and you.  You can take the 3 opponents and cut that in half and add in 1 round if it's the turn or 2 rounds if it's the flop.  Let's say it's the flop and on the turn and river we now have 1.5 times 2  times 2 again and you have 6 extra bets you'll say you'll win if you hit.  Add this to the 1 in 4 you have now and the payout is 8:1 and the odds are 7:1 so it's doable.  As you get better at this you can think this through a bit more and say that this player will call all the way and this guy you could probably get to call a raise and this guy will fold and so on but the half call to the river is a good starting point, and you can adjust this up or down depending on the tightness or looseness of the table and the players in general.

This probably seems pretty daunting for a newer player starting to try to figure out this stuff but it really isn't that bad as you get used to thinking this way and once you do get a good handle on this you'll be way ahead of where you are now and ahead of most online players.

King Cobra Poker

http://kingcobrapoker.com/lessons.html