Drawing Hands and Pot Odds

[tek]

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Re: Pot odds. The dirty little secret about hold 'em is that the concept of pot odds isn't very helpful. A much better idea is to look at your effective odds, which is a way of expressing the relationship between how much it's going to cost you to see your hand through vs. how much you expect to win if you end up dragging the pot.

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Let's open the discussion to using effective odds vs. implied odds if pot odds are insufficient. I go with effective odds. If you are going to estimate how big the pot will be at a showdown, then you should factor in your total bets to get to the showdown.

[AntHillMob]

Effective/Implied odds is the technically correct way of deciding whether to call (looking at the odds of making it by the river compared to the extra bets it will cost and the extra bets you may win).

For most purposes, just looking at pot odds for the next card (odds of making the hand with one card, at cost of calling 1 card - not the full river odds or cost) seems to give the same decisions by and large and it's easier to calculate. Obviously it doesn't quite work for backdoors (but the 1.5 outs conversion does the trick) and generally it seems to slightly underestimate some draws. Usually it comes up with the same decision though.

What's definitely wrong is to use the odds of hitting by the river with the cost of just the next card.

Ian