· PKWAT · Structures and references
Pot odds, without the chart
Pot odds are the price of a call: what it costs you, measured against what the pot will pay once your call is in it. Divide the first by the second and you have the share of the time your hand needs to win for the call to break even. Everything else in this article is that division, done with real cards in front of you.
TL;DR — Required equity = call ÷ (pot after your call). Half pot needs 25%, a pot-sized bet 33%, twice the pot 40%. A flush draw on the flop wins about 35% of the time, so it calls half pot and folds to three times it.
The one line
Required equity = call ÷ (pot after your call has gone in)
There are 100 chips in the middle. Your opponent bets 50. Calling costs you 50, and the pot you are playing for is the 150 that is there now plus the 50 you are about to add: 200. So you need 50 ÷ 200, which is 25%.
After your call has gone in is the whole trick. The pot you divide by is never the one you can see while you are thinking; it is the one that will exist a moment after you act. The last section of this article is about the two ways of getting that wrong.
Five sizes worth knowing by heart
Nobody bets in amounts. People bet in fractions of the pot, and there are about five fractions in circulation, so there are about five prices worth carrying around. Derive them once, for a bet of any size into a pot of any size:
bet ÷ (pot + 2 × bet)
The bet appears twice because it goes into the pot twice: theirs, then yours. Half pot into 100 is 50 ÷ (100 + 100), which is 25%, which is the example above.
| They bet | You need | As a ratio |
|---|---|---|
| a third of the pot | 20% | 4:1 |
| half the pot | 25% | 3:1 |
| three-quarters | 30% | 2.3:1 |
| the pot | 33% | 2:1 |
| twice the pot | 40% | 1.5:1 |
Learn the middle three. They cover most of what anybody bets, and the outer two come up rarely enough that you will have time to work them out.
A hand: 9h 8h in the big blind
A price on its own is half an answer. The other half is what you are holding while you pay it, so here is a hand.
You are in the big blind with 9h 8h. The button raises, you call, and the flop comes Kh 6h 2s. You have a flush draw: nine hearts left in the deck, and almost any one of them gives you the best hand. There are 100 chips in the middle. The button bets 50.
50 / 200 = 25%
Calling costs 50 to play for 200, so the price is 25%. Now the draw:
| flush | 9 outs | × 4 | ≈ 36% | exact 35% |
|---|
Thirty-five beats twenty-five, and it is not close. This is a call, and you make it without a second thought. Notice what happened: a division turned into a comparison. You did not compute anything at the table. You knew half pot was 25%, you knew a flush draw on the flop was about 35%, and you put one next to the other.
The same hand, on the turn
The turn is the 3c. Nothing changed for you: still nine hearts, still one card short. There are 200 chips in the middle now, and the button bets 100.
100 / 400 = 25%
The price is the same 25%. The draw is not the same draw: with one card to come, nine outs are worth 19.6%, not 35%.
| flush | 9 outs | × 2 | ≈ 18% | exact 19.6% |
|---|
Nineteen does not beat twenty-five. Facing the same bet size, with the same cards, the flop call becomes a turn fold — and the reason is nothing about the opponent or the bet. It is that a draw is priced by how many cards are still coming, and the price of the call has to be compared to that number, not to the one you remembered from the flop.
The same draw against a bigger bet
Back to the flop, same cards, same 100 in the middle. This time the button bets 300.
300 / 700 = 43%
Calling costs 300 to play for 700: 43%. The draw is still worth 35%. Fold. Nothing about your hand got worse; the price got worse, and pot odds are the tool that lets you tell the two apart.
Ratios and percentages are the same sentence
The two notations count from different ends. A ratio counts the pot against your call: 3:1 means the pot pays three for the one you put in. A percentage counts your call against the whole thing including itself: 25% means your call is a quarter of what is being fought over.
3:1 and 25% are one fact. So are 2:1 and 33%, and 4:1 and 20%. Use whichever you already think in, and convert when you have to: n:1 becomes 1 ÷ (n + 1).
The percentage is the one you want at the table, because the thing you compare the price to — how often your hand wins — is already a percentage. The ratio is what you will hear said out loud, and it is quicker to see: when the pot is three times what you are asked to put in, that is 3:1 before anybody has divided anything.
What pot odds do not tell you
Pot odds answer exactly one question: is this call right if the hand ends here? That is the right question when somebody is all in, or on the river, or when the bet leaves nothing behind to play for.
With chips still to come it is an incomplete question. Call the flop bet above intending to see the river as well, and the price you paid on the flop is not the price of the hand: the chips you might win later when a heart lands move the answer one way, and the chips you might have to pay to get there move it the other. That is implied odds, and it deserves its own article rather than a paragraph here.
Pot odds also say nothing about what your opponent holds. They tell you the price. What you are buying — the share of the time your hand ends up best — is your estimate, and it can be wrong. Nine outs to a flush is only nine outs if the flush is good when it comes.
The mistake, which is always the denominator
Nobody gets the top of the fraction wrong; your call is your call. Both of the common errors are underneath it, and they push in opposite directions.
Forgetting your own call. The button bets 50 and there are now 150 chips in the middle, so you compute 50 ÷ 150, which is 33%. You fold a flush draw that needed 25%, and you will never find out, because folded hands do not send you a receipt.
Counting their bet twice. There were 100 chips, the button bet 50, and you count the pot as 100 plus 50 plus the bet again: 200, plus your call, 250. You call at 20% with a hand that was getting 25%, which happens to be fine here and will not be fine next time.
When you are unsure, stop doing arithmetic and count. Count the chips that will physically be in the middle if you call, and divide your call by that. The number you want always has the same shape: what I pay, over what will be there.
FAQ
How do I calculate pot odds quickly at the table? Read the bet as a fraction of the pot, not as a number: about half, about the whole pot, about twice it. The five prices in the table above are the whole chart. Then ask one yes-or-no question — does my hand win more often than that?
What are the pot odds for a flush draw? The draw does not have pot odds; the bet does. A flush draw wins about 35% of the time with two cards to come and about 20% with one. It calls any bet up to about the size of the pot on the flop, and only a small bet on the turn.
Do pot odds change on the turn? The price of a given bet size does not; half pot is 25% on every street. What changes is the value of a draw, which roughly halves when there is one card to come instead of two.
What is the difference between pot odds and implied odds? Pot odds price the call as if the hand ended now. Implied odds add what you expect to win on later streets when you hit, and what you expect to pay when you miss. Use the first on the river and when somebody is all in; think about the second everywhere else.
Is 3:1 the same as 25%? Yes. 3:1 counts the pot against your call; 25% counts your call against the whole pot including itself. n:1 is 1 ÷ (n + 1).