Poker Beginner Tips

While playing a 5$ sit’n go this afternoon I came upon an ideal hand to explain to you beginners out there the important concept of the combination between outs and odds. This mathematical side of poker will turn out to be very profitable in the long run!

Outs

In poker you come across situations in wich you don’t hold the best hand and surprisingly enough that happens quite a lot This doesn’t mean you have to fold the hand immediately cause you could still have a draw to the best hand. Outs is the amount of cards that turns your hand into the best hand. Let’s make this clear by giving an example. You have and the flop comes . You probably don’t have the best hand as you only have a high card but if a club comes on turn or river you have a flush and likely the best hand. 52 cards minus the two in your hand and the three on the flop makes 47 unseen cards of which 9 could give you a flush. That gives you a percentage of 9/47 = 19,6 %

Luckily there’s an easy way to calculate this percentage: the 2/4 rule. If you wanna know the chance of hitting your draw on the turn, just multiply the outs with 2. In the above example this gives you 9×2 = 18%. If you wanna know the chance of hitting the draw on turn ór river, multiply the outs with 4.

Odds

Eventually you will have to compare the chance of hitting one of you outs with the price you pay, in comparison with the pot, for this hand or an extra card. This price is called pot-odds. Let’s explain first how to calculate them, next how to use them.

Pot-odds = required input / total pot

For example, the pot is 6 and your only contestant bets 2. Your pot-odds are now 2/10= 20%. 10 is the starting pot plus the bet of your contestant en your own input. You have to put 2 in to call so the pot-odds are 1 to 5 (which means that an input of 1 could bring in 5 times your input). An important thing to remember is that in some causes pot-odds are very uncertain as you don’t know what players behind you will do. In these situations you will have to rely on your knowledge of that player.

Combination

Let me show you how to combine outs and pot-odds by showing you the hand I played this afternoon.

I had :10h and the board was . There was 560 in the pot and I was heads up after a preflop raise. I’d put my contestant on a Jack with a good kicker (Ace/King). He bet 80. So I had to invest 80 to stay in the run for a pot of 640. So 80/640 = 12,5%. There were still 46 unknown cards in the deck of which 8 (four Queens and four 7’s would make me the winner. So 8/46 = 17 %.

Pot-odds were 12,5%. So I needed at least 12,5% chance to win to call this one. According to the 2/4 rule I would obtain this percentage when I had a bit more than six outs. And because I had eight outs, it was necessary for me to call this bet.

Eventually the river was so it didn’t help me and I folded after my opponents river bet. But in the long run I definitely made the right decision on the turn. I was crippled after that hand but still made it to a third place, just in the money.