Approximate Your Poker Odds
Written January 23, 2008 by Jack Jones
When you are at the tables you are going to have difficulty establishing the exact odds, so you need to learn how to approximate your poker odds. The good news is that we have put something together so you can figure out how to do just that.
It is extremely difficult unless you are a math whiz to figure out the exact odds of hitting a drawing hand when you are sitting down at the table. That leaves two options for the non-math genius: sit at home with a calculator and figure out the odds for every possible combination of draws and memorize them or estimate them. Unless you have a perfect memory it seems like putting all of those numbers in the think tank is going to be a fairly tough task.
So how do you estimate the odds? You will need to start by figuring out how many outs you have. An out is any card that gives you a made hand. To get this number, count the number of cards available that can give you the hand that you are drawing to. If you have a Kh 8h and see a flop of Qc 9h 4h then you know you have a flush draw, the h means hearts. There are thirteen total hearts in the deck and you see four of them. That leaves nine left in the deck and you get two chances to hit one if you see both the turn and the river.
The chance of you hitting the flush is ascertained by multipying the outs you have times the chances to hit it. In our situation it would be nine out times two chances, which gives you 18. Take that number, multiply it by two and that’s your percentage, so here it is 36%. Now the exact percentage is 34.97% but you can see that we are close enough for how quick we can come up with the accurate, even though it’s approximate, number.
Remember though that the percentage is how many times you will hit the hand you are drawing too, not how many times you will win the pot. You could hit your hand and lose, or you could not hit your hand and win. Still, knowing the approximate likelihood of making your hand is a good beginning step on the road to better poker.
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