All of the online poker calculators, whether they are the mathematical or empirical type, will tell you straight up what your pot odds are in a given situation. In fact, that somewhat simple calculation led to a whole industry being developed to where we are now users of a remarkable breadth of product choice to help out our online poker game.
Given that some players need help with, or enjoy the ease of having their pot odds displayed at every turn then you might imagine that figuring implied odds would be beyond the scope of most recreational players. The thing is, implied odds may have a more immediate and profound impact on making the correct decision in given situations, thus not understanding this concept will surely be costly to your game.
To keep things in perspective, think of your pot odds as “limited” and your implied odds as “unlimited” even though neither of those descriptions is truly accurate they can provide a somewhat measurable thinking guideline to players just starting out. The underlying factors when considering implied odds are the type of game you are playing, your opponents’ stack sizes, and your opponents’ style of play. Let’s have a look at each of these here.
If most of you are playing NL tournaments then there is no constraint on the type of game you are playing that would limit your implied odds in a given hand. However, if the game or tournament happens to be a limit game, then you have to factor how many betting rounds are left and how many opponents you have in the hand. If you are up against just a single opponent in a $2/$4 limit hold’em game, and there is $10 in the pot after the flop, you may only get two big bets out of this opponent if you hit your flush draw. I wrote “may” because you might have a non-capping situation with just the two of you at the river. Again though, if there is a flush on board, this isn’t a likely scenario to count on.
Then again your opponent’s style of play may come into factor here because if you happen to be up against a drunken maniac, sometimes even a heads-up limit situation would have lucrative implied odds. When you are up against an aggressive character in a no- limit situation it becomes all that more “implied”, especially when you become skilled at trapping these types of players.
The highest potential draws usually happen in no-limit games and tournaments, and if you are drawing, you should strive to do it against multiple players, and preferably in position so as not to get caught calling re-raises that tend to be of the “difficult decision” variety. Keep in mind that you should always be aware in these spots of how deep your opponent’s stack is and how much of it you might get in the event your draw comes through.
Let’s say you are drawing for a flush in the middle stages of a tournament and you need to call a bet of T1,000 from a single opponent. There is only T600 in the pot and your opponent only has another T800 left in his stack! That’s quite a raise to call for a very limited scoop. Your implied odds are terrible in that situation. Let’s say though that the pot is T1,000 and your opponent bets T600 this time, and he also has T5,500 in his stack! Better yet, there is someone else in the pot who has called before it came to you and he has a T3,200 stack. Well your odds AND implied odds are both far more lucrative propositions now and these are the times when your selectivity in deciding which pots to do battle in will produce huge long term positive results.
Given that we haven’t discussed other factors of the game like the tournament stage and your mzones, the first hand is nonetheless and easy fold, and the second hand is an easy call.
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