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The Pot Odds

By: A. Aguilar

Pot odds tell us if it is profitable to pay a bet based on the cards that we need to complete a hand (outs) and the size of the pot at the time.

Example: We are in a Sit and Go and have J-10. The flop is Q-K-6

The pot is 1600 pts and one player bets his remainder, 800 pts. You are served 8 cards in the deck to complete a straight, four aces and four nines. That will happen 30% of the time. To make a call out to account for these circumstances, the pot should offer 3.3 to 1 odds or greater. In this particular example, the pot offers 3 to 1. So it’s better not to bother paying if you go strictly by the pot odds, since the pot paid is worth less than the chances of getting a straight warrant it to.

Sometimes players don’t only consider pot odds when paying a bet: the money remaining to the playesr who have bet must be taken into account. This is money that can go into the pot in future bets. This is known as "implied odds".

One such example happened in 1980 at the annual World Series of Poker World Championship in Las Vegas, where the best poker players from the world meet every year. At the endgame, the hand ultimately staged two of the greatest champions in the history of poker, Doyle Brunson and Stu Ungar.

In a pot of 30,000 points, the flop was A-2- 7; Brunson bet 17.000 with two pairs, aces and sevens. Stu Ungar, who had 4-5 spades, after seeing the 235.000 points that remained in Brunson’s stack, decided to paybel;ieving that if a 3 came out he would collapse his opponent. The 3 came out on the turn and ended up into an All-in hand. If he had stuck strictly to the pot odds, the call would have been incorrect, since the pot needed to pay 10 ¾ to 1 odds to make it profitable for the straight. But with the stack (total number of chips) that Doyle Brunson had the implied odds were actually 14.5 to 1, remaining a cost-effective way to aim for this Gutshot straight (straight complete with 4 cards).

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