Poker is a game that many adults and some youth are familiar with. It’s an American pastime that makes some people a lot of money and others, not so much. Some poker players hate math, because they like to play based on feeling, but we’re here to prove that using math to play poker is the smartest way to play (and win!).
It’s true that many good poker players have good intuition. This may come from playing the game so many times or it may come from the ability to read people very well. However, the combination of good intuition and using math to make calculated decisions is generally what makes a good player. Don’t fret though – the math used in poker is often very simple. Through using basic math concepts, you can refine the decisions that might already be made by using instinct. Even players who mostly play based on feelings can be surprised to learn that certain decisions can be costing them money and the only way for them to truly fact check and establish whether certain plays are good ones is by checking to see if the poker math is correct.
So, how does math help in poker? Let’s talk about the two most basic concepts it helps with.
Pot Odds
Pot odds are the ratio of the current size of the pot to the cost of a call. Pot odds are often compared to the probability of winning a hand with a future card in order to estimate the call's expected value. A “call” is a term used to match the current amount of the bet made by a previous player in the round of betting. In the final round of betting the pot is then won by the best hand held by the player who calls the final bet (or the player who made that bet and goes unrivaled). Some poker gamblers describe pot-odds in the form of ratio and some percentage, either way they are describing how often you need to win to make the call. For our purposes, we’ll use percentage.
Say for example, say like there is $15 in the pot and you face a bet of $5 from your opponent. How often do you need to win to make the call? This is an example where intuition may mislead you. You might feel that 50% of the time you need to have a decent hand in order to call. However, you don’t have to be the one to statistically win the hand in order to call. Most of the time, it’s not about thinking whether you’ll lose most of them time. It’s more about the amount being bet on. You don’t need to win the pot 50% of the time to come out successful because there is already money in the middle. So, how often do you need to win? Here’s a very simple something to remember:
Percentage of all the money you invest = how often you need to be calling
Poker math can get very complicated by people who know, perhaps, way too much. The statement above us really simple though. If you called in the example above, you’d be investing $5 out of a total pot of $20 (after your $5 is added), which would be 25% of the total pot. With you investing 25%, you really only need to have the best hand 25% or more of the time to make a profitable call.
Bluffing Success
Bluffing is a term known for when a player acts as though they have a good hand and makes a call or bet to get other players to put in more money in the pot. To bluff is to make this type of bet. The objective of a bluff is to make someone fold, or lay down their cards earlier than yours, despite whether they have a better hand than yours or not.
Alright, for the next example, let’s say there is $100 in the pot. You decide to bluff for $50, which is fairly high for what’s in the pot. How often would your bluff need to work to make money? Similar to the last example, if you were just going by feeling, you might think that it needs to work over 50% of the time. However, imagine it like this. There’s $1,000,000 on the table and you are told that if you bluff for $50 and it will work 40% of the time. Of course you would bluff! The stakes are higher in your favor to win more money with $1,000,000 on the table, but your percentage odds are the same. It then goes back to a similar statement as above:
Percentage of all the money you invest = how often your bluff needs to work
Ok, so back to the first bluff example. If we put $50 in the pot after our opponent’s call, we are investing $50 in a total pot of $150. Odds of actually winning that are 33.33%. If your bluff works over a third of the time in this scenario, you’re still making money, even though bluffing won’t work two thirds of the time.
With all that said, we don’t want to tell you that it’s only that simple and there aren’t further calculations you can use to come up with better odds of winning. However, those are two of the simplest statistics tricks to help you become a better poker player. We hope you use them at your next poker night!
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