Odds & Outs vs. Hand to Range Equity (or how to evaluate a Holding?)

[Norb]

In a full ring limit game I often use the odds & outs approach to evaluate a draw, as it is teached in many poker books. In a short handed game the situation is quite different and often you have some kind of holding but without a read on your opponents it is normally very difficult to make some judgement about the circumstances. The odds & outs approach to evaluate a mediocre holding is often questionable because you don't know whether you are drawing to a winning hand and you don't know whether your outs are clean.

Recently I recognized in some training videos from professional Internet Poker players, that they use another kind of judgement method if they are against one or two players who they don't know. They are able to make some approximate evaluation about the equity of their own hand compared to the possible range of hands, that an opponent might hold from a specified position. And because they don't give anything about the tricky actions of an unknown opponent who might hold nothing or nearly nothing, they just evaluate their winning chances with this calculation and decide, if they proceed or fold their hand.

This sounds promising because the chances, that a single opponent might hit anything on the flop is only about 32% but he might be tricky and try to push you out of the pot. With the classic odds & outs evaluation, you have only a chance if you draw to something big but with anything else it is very difficult to counterstrike the villains bluffing and semi-bluffing attacks.

Now my question is, when should I use the odds & outs evaluation and when should I evaluate the EV of my hand aganist the opponents possible range of hands to make a judgement for my further actions?

Is it possible to mix up those two evaluation methods and how can this be done?

Thank you very much for your help!

Norbert

[djmeehan]

If I understand your question correctly, it seems that you only need to use odds and outs calculations when you are sure you are behind. If you are unsure, you are blending the 2 methods.

When a loose passive check raises the turn when the 3 flush hits or the board pairs I put more credence in the odds and outs calculations. When check raised by a loose aggressive tricky opponent on a draw heavy board I think more about what range of hands my opponent is doing this with because it is much wider than the first opponents range. Against the loose aggressive, I would try to judge the strength of my hand versus his range currently and what the chance of him hitting his draw is if he is drawing and what the chances are of me improving to a winner if I'm behind. That is your equity and then you need to compare it to your pot odds. Obviously calculating this in an exact way in the heat of battle (multitabling Probably) is too much but the more hands you play you get a pretty accurate feel for it. This is where reviewing your hands come in. You can use pokerstove if you are interesting in coming up with an exact # against an opponents range.

[TheWunderkind]

It depends on your read/ teh sd value of your own Hand and on the board texture basiclly...but most likely its a mixture of both...you evaluate the hand range of your opponent and then look how much sd value your hand actually has and how much outs you have if behind and vs how much holdings you need to improve and how much vs each holding + how much fold eqity you have(wich is veryvery small till none very often)...of course you cant do all this in a few seconds so you have to do your homework