Poker Math That Matters

this example, is pretty disguised. If an 8 comes on the river, he
may miss that straight possibility altogether.
In any case, we know his hand, and he doesn't know ours. So,
we're almost certain to get money from his two pair if we make
our straight. Now, let's say he has another $20 left on the river.
We call his $5 bet on the turn even though are immediate odds
tell us we should fold. The river is an 8, and he goes all-in for
his pot size bet of $20. We happily call. We made an extra $20
off our turn call. So, let's go back to looking at our odds on the
turn. If we include his $20 in our odds, instead of getting 15:5
(3:1) on our turn call, we'd be getting 35:5 which is 7:1. With
7:1, we only need to be good 12.5% of the time. We're going to
win 16% of the time, so we'd be able to call if we knew we could
get our opponent's stack when we hit.
This brings us to another important concept with implied odds.
The stronger the opponent's hand is, the greater our implied
odds. The weaker our opponent's hand is, the weaker our
implied odds. Using our example hand, if our opponent held JJ
instead of AK, it's very unlikely we would get a lot of money
from him on the river. Most likely he'd check and fold to a river
bet, and then you wouldn't get any money from him on the river.
Your turn call would have lost money. Figuring out if your
opponent has a strong hand or not will take time and experience.
That's part of hand-reading. We'll get to dealing with the fact
that we can't see our opponent's cards later in this book. For
now, let's get back to figuring out how to calculate implied odds
at the table.
When looking at implied odds, we add the amount we think we'll
win to our odds when we need to make the call. However, this is
pretty difficult for me to do at the table. So, here's a quick way
for you to estimate how much you need to win in order to justify
a call.
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