Hold Em Odds

The Importance of Hold em Odds

"What are the odds?" you may hear people say when something unexpected happens. Usually, when used in everyday speech, people are not looking to know exactly what the likelihood was of that particular event occurring, they just use it as a figure of speech. Another figure of speech commonly used is to say "the odds are against him" for example. Unless you are talking to your bookie or buddies at the race track it is unlikely that they have actually calculated the odds, sometimes it might even be impossible to do so. But when you are playing poker the odds become very precise and important. The most common variant of poker these days is texas hold em and knowing the hold em odds at every stage of the game is an important aspect of being a good, winning poker player.

Calculating your hold em odds

The formula to calculate hold em odds is fairly straight forward. Given your hand and the community cards, how many cards will improve your hand? How many cards will improve your hand into the best possible hand, or the winning hand? You could just count it out. If you have a pair on the flop you can see five of the cards in the whole deck, and you know that there are only two other cards that can give you trips, thus 2 out of 47 gives you roughly 4 percent chance of making trips on the turn. If you have a four cards to a flush on the turn, nine cards can help you out of 46 remaining, meaning you have roughly 20 percent chance of hitting your flush.

The Online Poker Advantage

The math behind hold em odds is fairly straight forward, but there are often cases where you may be drawing to many different hands at once. You may have a straight flush draw with an over pair for example, making the odds calculation much trickier. Luckily, when playing poker online, there are programs available called poker odds calculators which calculate exactly what your odds are at every stage of the hand. Calculatem Pro, for example, can calculate what your odds are to make any particular hand, what the odds are that your opponents hold a certain hand, and even what the pot odds are. Have all the odds calculation mathematics done for you with Calculatem Pro.