Implied Odds

Implied Odds is basically the science (some might say art) of factoring in the value you may get from a poker hand as a whole (over all betting decisions), rather than the value at just the current betting decision. For example how many chips will enter the pot BOTH pre-flop AND on the flop, rather than thinking about just how many chips are entering the pot pre-flop in isolation. In short you are implying that X more chips will enter the pot at a later betting decision, and then looking at how that effects your pot odds for the current decision.

Implied odds are extremely important to understand and act on correctly. It is worth spending some time reading the examples below to help it sink in and enable you to use them correctly at the tables.

Example 1:

A player who is very loose and plays like a total maniac raises to 400 preflop, with blinds at just 25/50. He does this from a 5000 stack, and you are sat on around 6000 chips yourself. It is folded around to you and you are last to act.

Now looking at this player's playing style and seeing how much a 400 raise starts to commit him to the pot, we can start to attribute some reasonable implied odds. Lets say we have pocket threes. Now there is about a 7.5% chance of hitting a set of 3's on the flop. At the moment we are sat in the big blind and contemplating calling 350 more for a pot of 850. Our cost to call is 41% of the pot. As you can see this cost is way bigger than the liklihood of hitting you set. However because of this player's style and his pre-flop commitment to the hand, we can probably make a reasonable assumption that there is very good chance he could end up getting the chips all-in post-flop. Now, when we factor in these implied odds, the cost to you is 350, with a view to picking up 850 + 4600. Our cost to call can now be seen as 6.4%, which is lower than the liklihood of hitting your set, and thus starting to look like a much better proposition.

Example 2:

You have a open-ended straight flush draw at the turn. You are about 18% to hit it. The pot is already 4000 and your opponent bets 2500, leaving himself 7000 behind. The cost for you to call is 27.7% (2500/9000). So it is too expensive for us in isolation. But how much do we need to get from the player on the river to make it ok to call? We do this by doing ((2500/0.18)-9000)/2 = 2444. So if we thought he would bet/call at least 2444 on the river, then we have the odds to make the call on the turn. You will need to use your very best judgement about that player to decide. He will for example be calling 2444 to win 13888, so as long as he has some sort of hand you can probably get a value bet in there to justify the implied odds call on the turn in the long term.

Some important things to always take into account when working with implied odds in general are, always give specific attention to the type of player you are up against and the likelihood of them commiting a lot more chips to the pot. And also always look at your effective stacks. ie take the lowest of your 2 stacks as the base point for your decision, as this will be the most that you can possibly double up from.