How much do Implied Odds apply in NL Holdem poker?
Often you will hear players talk about making a call when the odds don’t seem to add up, claiming that they do it for “implied odds”.  In this weekly tip, I’ll discuss the math behind implied odds calculations, but most importantly I’ll discuss a few considerations you need to make in determining whether they do apply in your situation in NL Holdem.   I’ll conclude with an expert strategy tip.  To make this discussion simpler, I’m going to make the generalization that we are considering only our odds when faced with calling a bet on the flop.  Implied odds apply in all areas of the game except when deciding to call on the river.  But since most people discuss implied odds in terms of a flop call, I’ll discuss that specific situation.  The math and concepts involved apply just as much to other situations.
First, there are four things you need to consider in any implied odds calculation:

1. Pot odds – the ratio of the amount in the pot prior to your call to the amount you have to call.
2. Your actual odds of winning the hand, generally expressed in terms of hitting your draw.
3. Your potential win in terms of money left to be put in the pot by your opponents.
4. Whether your opponents are likely to pay you off if you do hit your draw.

The easiest way to discuss this is in terms of a common draw.  For this example, I’ll use an open-ended straight draw.  You are playing at a typical $1/$2 online NL Holdem 6-Max Cash game table.   There is $12 in the pot heading into the flop and we’ll assume you have one opponent. Both of you have approximately $200 in your stack.  Your opponent bets $8, a standard 2/3 pot size bet.  Let’s consider the 4 items one at a time:

1. The pot odds are 20:8 or 2.5:1 ($12 pot + his $8 bet compared to the $8 you need to call).
2. The odds of you hitting your open-ended straight draw are 39:8 or approximately 4.9:1 (there are 8 cards that give you your straight and 39 that don’t out of the 47 cards you haven’t seen).  These are the odds you need in order to make the call.  So, if you subtract your required odds from the actual pot odds, you can see that the pot is $19 short of giving you the odds you need to make this even money.
3. There’s plenty of money in your opponent’s stack to make up that $19 if you do make your draw.

Before we get to number 4, which is really what I’d like to discuss, I want to make one thing clear – all top players, and most solid players, can make calculations 1 and 2.  If you don’t know your basic pot odds, learn them.  You have to be able to make these calculations quickly, whether it’s a flush draw (9 outs), straight draw (8 outs), or whatever it might be.

4. Will your opponent make the call and pay you off if you DO hit your straight draw?  In my opinion, implied odds are highly overrated in NL Hold’em and they are often an excuse made by losing players to call when they shouldn’t.  Don’t fall into that trap!  In order to call based on implied odds, you need to have an answer to a very specific question: 

“How often will my opponent call and how much will I win when he or she DOES call me?”

Some of the factors that go into making this calculation are the following:

1. How far are you from having the correct pot odds to call?  The farther off you are, the more confident you need to be that your opponent will call.  In the above example, if you make the call the pot will be $28.  If you hit your straight, you need to AVERAGE a $19 additional win to make up the pot odds shortage.  That is 2/3 the size of the pot you’ll need to win on AVERAGE on the turn or river — often difficult in NL Hold’em, especially against solid players.
2. How well disguised is your hand?  As a general rule straights are more disguised than flushes, especially double-gutshot straights such as 9-8 on an J-7-5 board.  Your opponent is not very likely to fear the 6 or T on the turn that hits your straight and you are much more likely to get a nice payoff.
3. How loose/weak is your opponent?  The looser your opponent, the more likely he or she will pay you off.
4. How likely is it that your opponent will re-draw on you?  It is often possible for your opponent to beat you even if you hit your draw.  Don’t make the mistake of underestimating (or ignoring completely) the possibility that your opponent will sometimes end up stacking you.  And I say stacking because when you make a big draw, most of the time you will have the best hand and you WANT the money to get into the pot – but sometimes that money will go the other way.  The more likely it is that your opponent may beat you even if you hit the draw – watch out.

Those are just some of the factors to consider, but you must consider them.  Don’t fall into the losing trap of relying on false implied odds to justify a bad call in NL Hold’em. It’s one of the top ways losing players donate their chips.  Against a good opponent who might have redraws, you might have little to no implied odds. 

As a final expert consideration, I sometimes like to think about implied odds outside of the current hand.  This really only applies in cash games, but it can also apply to some degree in tournaments.  Have you ever been playing at a table online where one of your opponents loses to a draw and berates the other player for making a stupid call?  We’ve all seen that many times.  Players like this are prone to tilt badly.  If I know I’m playing against someone like that, I’ll often play slightly worse drawing hands against that opponent.  The reason I do this is because my future-hand implied odds are outstanding.  If I hit my “bad” draw against a player prone to tilt, this fool is very likely to make the very poor decision to go on tilt against me.  He becomes a very stackable opponent, and I love stackable opponents.  So if you are playing against someone who you know is prone to tilt, consider those future-hand implied odds in the decisions you make playing against them.

If you would like to test your skills at measuring pot odds and implied odds, be sure to take our free 50 hand NL Holdem Poker IQ test at http://www.testyourpoker.com/poker.  Our test analyzes your play in over 30 specific areas, and our members receive a detailed report that provides an assessment of your abilities at many of these skills, including your ability to understand pot odds, in addition to an array of Detailed Analysis Reporting Tools (DARTs) that help them target their poker training to the areas they need it most.

When you have the best possible hand you can have in a given situation, your goal is to extract as much money as possible from your opponents. This is an area where you will often hear tips about how to do this, with greatly contradictory advice. Some will tell you to play it slow to keep your “paying customers”, others will tell you to play it strong because your opponents will expect you to play it slow.

Our advice is to ignore these generalizations, they will make you predictable and will not come close to maximizing your potential winnings. When you have the nuts, you are no longer playing your hand, you are playing your opponents’ hands. Because of this, there is no general strategy that will work when you have the nuts.

So where does this leave you?

Right where you want to be. You have the best hand and you KNOW it. Use your reading skills to your advantage. Replay the hand in your mind and put your opponent on a range of likely hands. If you can do that, then you have the knowledge to maximize your winnings.

Here are three possible examples:

1. You think your opponent is on a draw - Make them pay for their card. Do not attempt to slow play or check-raise. Use your knowledge of odds to charge your opponent a price to continue.
2. You think your opponent has a very strong hand, e.g. Second Nuts - Try to get all your chips in as soon as possible. It will be very hard for them to fold their strong hand. This becomes especially true if you believe that your opponent likely has you on a different hand and there are many “scare cards” that could run your opponent off if you wait until later streets.
3. You think your opponent has nothing, or a weak hand - You probably aren’t going to get anything out of them unless they improve. If you know your opponent is  aggressive and may take a shot at the pot, let him or her play into you. If not, your best chance to get any chips may be to let them try to improve.

What if you can’t get any sort of read on what hand your opponent has? Then ask yourself if you know anything else about your opponent. If you’re playing at a low stakes table, most of your opponents are not very strong players. Bad players come in all shapes and sizes, but almost all of them have one thing in common - they call too much. Against that sort of opponent, betting big is the way to go.

So, lacking any other information, bet your hand strongly and hope for a call or (better yet) a raise.

Our resident training professional, Ron Rose, has decided to allow our members to split 20% of his 2008 World Series of Poker Senior event winnings equally among themselves.  This is a huge benefit for our members because Ron has a tremendous track record at this event: 1st and 6th in the two years he played it!

We were doing some calculations and we figured out that if he won it this year, based on our total number of members as of today, every member would get about $6,000.  Not a bad payday.

Look for more promotions with Ron in the future.  He is going to be very active with the site, much more than just providing the expertise for the analyzer.   We thank Ron for his help with the site and for making this 20% winnings committment for our members.  If you want to read more details about it, just go to http://www.testyourpoker.com/poker/win_with_me.php

Congratulation to Kyle Casper of Pound, WI, who won our most recent free drawing.  He will receive an Autographed Scotty Nguyen card in a sealed display case. 

Our next drawing is for an Erick Lindgren official 8×10 glossy photo, also AUTOGRAPHED. 

Good Luck!  All you have to do is take our free No-Limit holdem test, and enter your email address after you take the test, and you will be entered in the drawing.

Some of you have been asking what we’ve been working on the past couple weeks.  Well, to let the cat out of the bag, we are pleased to announce that very VERY soon there will be an all new, massive database of additional hands to play.  The entire team has been working on these round the clock (literally — it’s after 4AM as I write this). 

This new database of extra tests will be available to our members only to help them continue to test their skills and track their improvement.  We think this is the most exciting addition to the site since we launched the original test (which will still be available).

Are you an expert poker player who has always wanted to be involved with a poker training site?  This might be your chance.  We still have tons of work to do to continue to improve the site and add new content. 

www.TestYourPoker.com is looking to add two new members to our Team of Experts.  This is not a “job offer”, nor is it a paid position (strictly speaking).  The requirements are as follows:

1. You must be a legitimate poker expert, ideally professional or semi-pro, who plays regularly in live games or online.  While there isn’t a strict definition of ‘expert’, we’ll require some proof of this (i.e. if you’re an online player, we may require some statistics from your pokertracker database).   
2. You must be well educated in both “book-learned” poker knowledge, and 1000s of hours of live poker play. 
3. Time to devote at least 5-10 hours a week to this project (maybe more).
4. Computer skills are definitely a big plus.

If this sounds like you, go to the “Contact” page and let us know.  If you are accepted onto the TestYourPoker.com team of experts, be prepared to be put to work!  The benefits, however, are many:

1. By working with a team of other expert poker players, YOUR poker game will improve, even if you are already a great poker player. 
2. You’ll be listed and pictured on our site as part of the Team of Experts.
3. We can also discuss methods for you to profit from your involvement here (private lessons, revenue sharing).

We remember asking ourselves that in October of 2006.  At the time, it didn’t seem like such a tough task — a month or two of work to design the test, create the analyzer, and finish the web site.  Well, 18 months and about 20,000 hours later, here we are. 

The two toughest parts of the whole process were:

1. Designing 50 poker hands that sufficiently tested every poker skill imaginable.  The hands had to be designed to accomplish this task for all different levels and styles of players.  Therefore, we needed some easy situations and some hard situations.  Plus, some situations that were most likely to trap over-aggressive players, and some computerized opponents that were meant to push tight-passive players around.  The test alone took us 3 months to write, and it is still being refined.
2. Analyzing poker mistakes that don’t just happen in a vacuum.  Bluffing and slowplaying are prime examples.  When is it wrong to slowplay?  When is it wrong to bluff?  That depends on a lot of factors — who are you trying to bluff, how many chips do they have, how many times have you tried to bluff recently.  We had to write our analyzer to adjust for all these different factors and more.

We hope you enjoy your visit.  With new content being added every day, we hope to soon establish ourselves as the premier site for poker training on the web.  Feel free to browse the site and be sure to take the poker test on the home page.  We’ve been working on it for a year and a half (seriously)!