Much can be said about various odds in poker, this post will just give you the basics and a simple rule to use. To calculate the odds of getting the card we need to make our hand we need to consider how many unseen cards there are left in the deck. Say we have AKs of hearts and at the turn the board is 3h7h2dJc, meaning there are 2 hearts there, so we would need a third heart on the river to make our flush. You know the value of your 2 private cards and the 4 community cards, so there are 47 cards left in the deck we don’t know the value of. You know the location of 4 of the hearts, so there are 9 hearts left. The chances to make your flush on the next card then is 9/47 which equals 19%. The number of cards left that will make our hand are called outs.

A simple rule you can use to figure out the odds of making your hand is to use what I call the 2/4 rule. You take the number of cards that will improve your hand, in this case 9, and multiply that by 2 to find out the chances of making your hand on the next card. If you want to know the chances on making your hand on the next 2 cards, from flop to the river that is, multiply it by 4. Using this we can see that the chances of making a flush on the next card is 18% and on the two next cards is 36%. For a straight draw with 8 outs it is 16% and 32%. These numbers are not exact, but they are close enough and easy to remember.

Pot odds is also something you should also know the basics about, that is the ratio of the current size of the pot to the cost of a contemplated call. It is the odds the pot gives you, and you can use these odds together with regular odds to figure out if a call is good in some situations.

Say you have AKs of hearts like the former example, the flops has 2 hearts, 3h9hJc. The pot is say $150 on the flop and your opponent decides to go all in for his $100 stack. To get the pot odds we now add the $150, our opponents $100 and the $100 of your own money you need to put in to make the call. The pot odds are then $100/$350 which equals 30%. If our odds of winning are higher than our pot odds we should call. Odds of winning are 4 times 9% which equals 36% according to the 2/4 rule, so we should call.

There is lots of more to learn about odds in poker, it is a strategy game with a lot of math to it after all. This short intro should be enough to get you started though. Now you can move on to part 13 about bankroll management.