While playing Texas Hold'em poker, you may have heard someone say “I don’t have a great hand, but I like the pot odds,” or “I love my draw, but I don’t have the odds to call.” If you don’t know what the phrase pot odds means, you need to learn right now if you are going to be successful in Texas No Limit Hold’em. If you do know, you should be thinking about how to put your knowledge into practice in your games.

Pot odds are the amount of money the pot is laying you if you win the hand. For example, if you are facing a $10 bet and there is $40 in the pot, you asked to risk $10 to win $40, giving you 40 to 10, or 4 to 1, pot odds. This means if you win this situation once every four times, you will break even, as you will put up your 10 four times for a total of -40, and win the 40 pot once for a total of +40.

The way you put pot odds to work for you is in helping you to decide whether to continue in a particular hand. You need to determine your outs, or cards that will come that will make your hand best (of course, it’s not always possible to know this exactly, but do the best you can). With one card to come, there are 46 cards you haven’t seen (52 total minus the four on the board and the two in your hand). Subtract your outs from 46 in this case to get your ratio. For example, if there are nine cards that will win for you, 46-9 is 37. There are 37 cards that hurt you vs. 9 that help is 37 to 9 which reduces roughly to 4 to 1, giving you 4 to 1 odds to win the hand. If your pot odds are greater than 4 to 1, you have a positive expected value http://planetmath.org/encyclopedia/ExpectedValue.html (+EV) call.

Other factors that will come into play when determining pot odds are implied odds and fold equity. Implied odds are pot odds that take into account money you are likely to win on later hands if you hit your hand. Fold equity represents an additional percentage for you to win the hand by getting opponents to fold to your bet without having to see the next card. These are more advanced concepts that you will pick up as you continue to play and practice.

texas holdem odds are also important to consider when sizing your bet. If you think you have the best hand, you want to make it unprofitable for your opponents to draw at theirs. This does not mean you need to push your whole stack in any time you see a draw against you. If you can just give each opponent slightly bad odds to call, you will come out ahead in the long run. Often a pot- sized bet is sufficient for this purpose. For example, you have Ad Kd and the flop is Ks 8s 9h. There is $100 in the pot and your opponent checks to you. If you bet $100 in this situation, your opponents will have to call $100 to win $200, or 2 to 1. Since their odds to hit a flush or straight draw are greater than 4 to 1 (or greater than 2 to 1 if you let them see both cards, but you will probably push them out with a big bet if they miss on the turn), it will be incorrect to call unless they believe you will call off the rest of your stack if they hit. Keep in mind if there are multiple players in the hand, each subsequent player will get better odds to call if the first one calls, so you may want to make a bigger bet to avoid this.

Remember that these sizing your bet considerations are much more in play in cash game strategy. In Texas holdem tournaments, if someone hits their one in five shot, you may not be around for the other four times out of five. Therefore, a better tournament strategy is to make a big enough bet to push a draw out, rather than get them to make a bad call.