Implied odds are an easy poker concept to understand, however they are not the most straightforward concept to correctly apply. Whether you play a GTO strategy, an Exploitative one, or a mixture of the two, understanding implied odds will be pivotal to your game. It’s vital that you properly understand the concept to be sure that you are not making simple mistakes.
This article explores what implied odds are, how implied odds are calculated, and then how you should use this information in game.
Normally, when we are talking about implied odds, it is because we understand that our hand is currently behind- not winning at showdown. In the hand we will have several outs to improve to a nutted hand. Straight draws, flush draws etc…
Implied Odds tell us how much extra we would need to win in a hand to make the earlier call profitable.
Implied odds are different to pot odds. If we have as much or more equity than the normal pot odds that we are given, we can make a profitable call. When we don’t have the required equity in a hand, we must look to see if we have the implied odds to make the call. Hands aren’t always as cut and dry as calculating equity and odds, there are more variables and factors in poker hands where it will be possible to win more chips.
When we don’t have the correct pot odds in a decision, our goal is to extract as much value from our hand when we do improve that we offset the original “unprofitable” decision. Note that the decision only has negative expected value when there are no other factors at play. It is important that we are making more money in the hand when we hit our draw, than we lose when we call, miss and have to fold.
It’s almost impossible in a game to work out our exact implied odds in a situation, just as it’s hard to work out our exact equity in a situation. We need to be able to roughly work out our equity, that is how frequently we will hit the card we need to win in the hand.
Our pot odds show us how frequently we need to win to break even. This is the price we have to pay to call divided by the total amount we will win. That’s the percentage of the pot we need to get back in the long run to break even.
With our pot odds and equity calculated, we can edit the pot odds formula to show how much extra would need to be in the pot for us to break even. That’s the implied part.
Don’t forget, there are then other pieces of significant information we must use to decide if making the extra chips is possible.
As I’ve said, we need to know our equity. The fastest way to do this is by translating our known outs into a percentage equity.
One out is approximately 2% equity per street.
To know how we calculated this you can find out more here: Link to “outs” or “poker maths”
We also need to know how to calculate our pot odds:
Hero’s Call/ (Pot Size + Villains Bet + Hero’s Call) = Required Equity
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So, we know our equity and we know our pot odds. Now we can edit our pot odds formula to show how much extra we would need to win to make the call profitable.
If our equity percentage is lower than the percentage of the time we need to win based on pot odds, we would not be breaking even on the call.
We need to know how big the pot would have to be to make that call profitable based on our equity.
To show this, we can edit our pot odds calculation:
Hero’s Call/ (Pot Size + Villains Bet + Hero’s Call + River Extra) = Our Actual Equity
To put that into an example:
Example needed: JhTh on 3d9hQc 4s with the action as seen below
We have an open-ended straight draw, which we know is 8 outs.
The action: Our opponent has bet 33% the size of the pot on the flop and then 66% on the turn. The starting size of the pot preflop is 5.5bb which means the size of the pot after the flop is 9.1bb.
On the turn, our Pot Odds Calculation will look like this:
6bb (our call)/ 9.1bb (pot size) + 6bb (villains bet) + 6bb (our call) = 0.28 (or 28%)
So, to break even if nothing else changed in the hand, we would have to win at show-down around 28% of the time. We know that we are only going to hit our straight on the river around 16% of the time. We will also assume that hitting a J or a T aren’t outs. As you can see, we currently aren’t getting the correct odds.
How big would the pot need to be to make the call profitable?
I’ve plugged it into the equation from above:
6bb / (9.1bb + 6bb +6bb + River Extra (x)) = 0.16
Simplified:
6/ (21.1 + x) =0.16 (multiply both sides by (21.1 + x))
6= 0.16 (21.1 + x) (divide both sides by 0.16)
6/0.16= 0.16 (21.1 + x)/0.16
37.5= 21.1 + x
37.5-21.1= x
X= 16.4bb
Now we know that on average in this situation, we must acquire an extra 16.4bb to make the turn call profitable.
Once you have a rough idea of your implied odds, you need to assess how likely it is that you will make that extra cash in the hand. There are multiple factors that you must be aware of on the table which indicate the likelihood that this happens
The easiest thing to pay close attention to, is the stack sizes at play, specifically the effective stack size. If you need to make a lot of chips on average at the river, it’s important that you can win a huge pot on the river too. You do this by check raising. If the effective stack is too small, it’s highly unlikely that in the long run you will be making enough chips to have justified that turn call.
Another point for consideration, how likely is your opponent going to bet the river if you make your hand? If the obvious draw is a flush draw and it comes in, it’s much less likely that your opponent will go for extra value (as the relative strength of their hand is low)
We can also use this time, especially in a live game, to play exploitatively. If we know that our opponent is quite aggressive, then it’s likely that they will put in another bet on the river, making it more likely that we will make the extra big blinds when we do make our hand.
If our opponent doesn’t value bet enough on rivers, that will decrease the ability to get this value. There’s many more exploitative scenarios to look out for on the river.
Alongside using implied odds when deciding if a call could be profitable, we can also use implied odds to think about if our opponent's call would be profitable. This can be used to determine if we should continue betting in a hand or think about controlling the size of the pot on the flop and the turn. It may also influence which sizing’s we would use (as smaller sizes give our opponent better implied odds).
How likely is it that your opponent could make, or already have, a better hand than you? If you are drawing to a flush, and then your opponent has a bigger flush, now you stand to lose even more money in the hand! Take care in situations where the strength of the hand that you make on the river may not be that high relative to the texture of the board. You could find yourself losing a lot more on average than winning