ToP - Chapter 5 - Pot Odds

[LordBrun]

From Chapter 5, Pot Odds:

"When you think your opponent might beat you even if you make your hand, you must adjust your odds of winning before comparing them to the pot odds you are getting. Let's say you are a 5-to-1 underdog to make your hand, and you are getting 7-to-1 from the pot. By itself your hand is worth a call. But suppose you feel there is a 30 percent chance your opponent will make a hand that beats the one you are trying to make."

For an inexperienced player such as myself, its fairly confusing when the writer introduces the idea that we give our opponent credit for having a specific hand 30 percent of the time. How did he come up with this number? I imagine we should assume the player in this example knows the opponent's game fairly well and has put him on a range.

If someone could shed some light on this it would be great. I havent read much of the available literature yet. Good articles/threads/books on hand ranges ?

/LB

[Kurn, son of Mogh]

SSHE treats this concept to some extent. For example, they recommend counting overcards as 1.5 outs apiece as opposed to 3.

Another example might be when you are drawing to a flush but one or two of your outs pair the board. It would make sense in this case to reduce your flush out by one.

Conservative estimates can't hurt.

[PantsOnFire]

This concept is based on rough estimates so it is not rocket science.

For example, when drawing to a flush on a paired board, there is a certain chance that villian already has a full house and a certain chance that he has either two pair or trips and can make a full house all of which will beat our nut flush. We can come up with a general guess for this scenario or if we have a read on villain and the action thus far in the hand is a clue, we can become more accurate.

The same applies for drawing to a flush on a non-paired board except there is no chance of trips now. So overall, this is a slightly better situation. And in NL, if we make the flush on the turn and the board doesn't pair, we can now bet the nuts with confidence.

Then there is the concept of discounting outs. If I have an OESD on a two flush board, there is a chance that if I make my straight with another flush card, I could still lose. So some people use 6 outs here instead of 8. However, that is assigning a 100% chance of a flush draw for villain. 50% is more reasonable so maybe we should use 7 outs.

So the whole idea you are looking at is taking the best case scenario in that if you hit the hand you are aiming at you will win 100% of the time. However, we all know this is not the case so you adjust your odds play and outs counting to account for the times you hit your hand but don't win. You can do this by discounting some of your outs or by estimating the chance that villain either has a better hand than the one you are drawing to or is drawing to a better hand than the one you are drawing to.