Pot odds pre flop

[BolliTrader]

how would I calculate pot odds / EV pre flop in Texas Hold 'em??? In other words I'm on the button and there are 6 callers (6x10=60 + sb(5) and bb(10) 75). I have j /images/graemlins/heart.gif t /images/graemlins/heart.gif... is it a positive EV to make this call??? In this case I have pot odds of 7.5:1, but what are the card odds that I'm going to hit a good enough hand to win???

Thanks,
Bolli

[Henke]

This takes quite alot of time to compute, and it depends on how exact you want the answer to be. To get a quite precise answer, you need to approximate the EV of all possible flops with this hand (including the number of bets that will go in on all streets), sum all the EV:s and if the result is above 0, you're OK. Now, this is quite tedious /images/graemlins/smile.gif, so I suggest you just follow the guidelines in HPfAP instead. /images/graemlins/laugh.gif

One problem with calculating EV with JTs is that there's a ton of possible flops that this hand likes, so even if you make alot of approximations, there's still much work to be done. However, I'll show you the general idea by using a hand like 88. That's alot easier since there aren't that many flops to analyze, because against many opponents, you need to flop an 8. That gives 1-C(48,3)/C(50,3)=11.76% chance of flopping a set. In those cases, you should be quite a big favourite to win, unless someone is out there with a flushdraw and/or a str8draw against you. You can still beat those if you get a full-house though. So the probability of winning is at least about 33%. However, if you have 15 outs against you, you'll still win if none of those come on the turn and river, which means you'll win at least 45% of the times you don't fill up. That means you should be at least a 60% favourite to win. However, this is far to conservative considering that there will rarely (I think) be 15 outs to beat your set. By approximating the number of outs more accurately, we can then continue with another approxmation; how many bets that will go in. When we "know" this, we can calculate the EV. This should give you a rough idea about how to calculate the EV of JTs...

Conclusion? Buy HPfAP /images/graemlins/grin.gif