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BASIC POKER MATH: All you need to know about pot odds and equity, part 1

Is a $10 bet big or small? What about a bet of $500?

If you don’t know the answer to that question from the top of your head, you know too little about the basic poker concept called pot odds to make any sort of money at the poker tables.

If you do know it, you probably remember when somebody (perhaps your coach at BPC) asked you that question, and you didn’t quite know what to say.

You might know which hands to 3B  bluff (none of them, until you know what pot odds are!), but really you are missing a basic part of the poker puzzle. You would be well served to cover the basics before going back to the tables – this will allow you to understand the game you are playing for yourself, and not simply repeating learned moves. But, first things first.

What are pot odds? Check out the video by Phil Hellmuth himself – he may not be #1 anymore, but he understands pot odds probably better than you at this point.

Ok, so now you understand what pot odds are.

In fact, you might be thinking to yourself, hell, I knew that I don’t need Phil to tell me these things. It’s a simple but often overlooked concept. Everybody knows about it, right? Nothing new here, that you didn’t know before. Or, is it? Do you really know it?

Let’s say the pot is 100$. Villain bets 43$. What are the pot odds being offered to you? Or, let’s say the pot is 75$. If you bet 125, what are the pot odds you are offering your opponent?

Do you need to stop and think, perhaps calculate in your mind? If so, it’s not good enough.

What good does it do you at the tables, if you know how to calculate pot odds, but don’t know them on the fly? Will you take a break to calculate the odds? No, you have no time. You have to memorize them, you have to drill it in your head.

Why do you think all top performers practice long hours, in any field? You think they are just randomly born great? They are not. They practice the little, boring things every day until they become great.

If you want to play poker, even for fun, it will serve you well to practice – unless you don’t like money, in which case you can still have fun at the tables – just make sure to let me know which times you are playing :D.

But enough about practice, you get the point.

Next step – what should you practice? There are so many possible numbers to calculate and recalculate… Don’t worry. You don’t have to know all the possible variations, it is enough if you memorize the standard bet sizes and a few more. You see, even if you play No-limit, most people still play like it is Pot-limit. They don’t over-bet or do it very rarely. So go for the low-hanging fruit, memorize the easy, most common spots.

You also don’t have to punch these numbers by yourself, we have already done the work for you, and you can download our cheat-sheets below, absolutely FREE of charge.

I promise you, these are the only pot odds you will ever need to know in your life. This is the chart all of our biggest winning CFP students are using. Download the pack with 2 desktop wallpapers and 2 different PDF versions.

You can see, that’s not a lot of numbers.

But if you don’t know them by heart, it might as well be 10 pages. So print them out, and look at them regularly, as often as you need to until they become second nature. Trust me, this is what all the big winners have done in our coaching programs, and are still doing. I should know, I went through the program myself.

Often, there is no secret to success. It’s just a lot of small things done right and done consistently.

In poker, knowing the pot odds like the back of your hand is one of those small things. Of course, that is just the beginning, and we will cover a lot more stuff in the future, to make sure you have the toolbox you need to survive at the tables.

I say survive, because the games are tough out there these days, and to make money you have to push yourself, and often need a mentor, whether in one of our coaching programs, or elsewhere, if you’re lucky enough to find someone on similar level, who is willing to take you on.

But no coach will do the work for you. So – download, print it out, set it as your desktop wallpaper and start memorizing the chart today!

GL at the tables!

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot – the answer to the question at the beginning: it depends on the size of the pot, of course. But you already know that by now.

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