How to determine your odds of winning a showdown?

[wyrd]

In the Theory of Poker, it talks about your odds of winning a showdown. However, the author never explains how he gets these odds. ie; If you figure yourself to be a 6-1 underdog to win the pot in a showdown, and your opponent gives you those pot odds, you should call. However, I have no idea how to figure out my odds of winning. Is this an intuitive guess based on the way the hand played out, or is there a chart somewhere that I can print out that shows the odds of someone hitting a full house with a pair on the board, and how much of an underdog I am if all I have is high pair?

Thanks for your time.

[gulebjorn]

What you are really asking is: how do I become a great poker player.

Like you said, ToP talks about pot odds and the odds that your hand will improve to the best hand on the river. The rest of it depends on what your opponent is holding. Unless you can figure out exactly what he has, you have to put him on a range of hands.

Harrington talks about this in HoH and it's really worth reading that book. If you play NL. For instance, you can usually take a 10% chance that your opponent is bluffing. Or lets say that you're playing with a guy who only raises from EP with AKs and AA. So now you could say that there is a 60% chance that he has AK and a 40% chance that he has AA. I'm just giving some examples in the hope that this will demonstrate how the concept works in a general way...

So to determine your odds of winning a showdown, you have to estimate what he is holding, and the probability of each holding, then calculate what the odds are that his hand will improve to a better hand than yours, calculate what your chances of improving are, and then combining all of that into your odds of winning.

When you are able to do this, you will be making a whole lot of money at this game. For now, you should probably be taking this one street at a time, and try to figure out what you are most likely to be up against.

[AKQJ10]

I think the salient point to understanding ToP is (I'm going from memory here) that Sklansky is just magically pretending he "knows" the probability his hand will win. BearHustler is right, part of learning poker is learning when you're a 2:1 favorite (based on how your opponents have played) and when you're a 2:1 dog. But Sklansky is just making up numbers to show a principle IIRC; you've gotta come up with your own educated guesses at the table.

See also this article: "Art and Science" by Brian Williammee