Playing Flush and Straight Draw

 Straight Draw or Flush?

The flop is over and you have a fairly decent flush draw. You have two hearts and you have two more on the flip.

You are faced with two choices: call to win the flush, or fold to save your money.

This is a great example of when you can use 'pot odds to decide if it's worth making the call.

What are pot odds and how do they work? What about flushes or straights?

If you don't know the name, you can forget it. You can think of the 'pot odds' as a method to find out if chasing a draw (such as a flush, straight, or flush) will be profitable. If you're not careful, you may have noticed that it's better to chase a draw when the stake is smaller than larger. However, we'll get to this in a moment.

You can see the odds of winning a certain size bet to finish your flush or draw.

What are pot odds?

Because it makes money.

When you find yourself stuck with a hand such as a flush draw, knowing whether to fold or call is a good idea will help you save (and win) money over the long-term. You will find that pot odds are very easy to calculate once you become familiar with them. This will make it quick and easy to determine if you should fold or call when you find yourself in sticky situations. That's how nice it is!

How to decide whether you should call with a flush draw or straight draw.

Here's the meat of this article. This is the meat of this article. But I can assure you that the 'working-out" part is not as hard as it seems. Give me a chance to explain it before you start to slap it in the face. Here we go...

The two most important parts of calculating pot odds are the first and second. The first part of the process is to calculate how likely it is for you to win your flush, straight or whatever you're chasing. The second part of the equation is to compare what size bet you have with what size pot you are dealing with. Next, we apply a bit of mathematical magic in order to decide if we should call.

1. Determine how likely it is that your draw will be completed. Complete a flush draw

For this part, all we need is to count the cards that we haven't seen and then work out how many unknown cards can be drawn.

Then, we can add these numbers together to make a very useful ratio. If we have a flush draw on the flip, we can calculate...

The maths.

There are 47 cards we don't know about (52 minus two cards and the 3 cards on flop).

9 of these cards could complete the flush (13 total diamonds minus 2 in our hand, and 2 in the flop).

The 38 other cards won't complete the flush (47 unknown cards, minus 9 helpful cards, results in 38 useless cards).

This is a ratio that gives us 38:9 or, scaled down... approximately 4:1.

We came up with a ratio of 4:1. This ratio is quite cool. It means that for every 4 cards we lose, and 1 card we receive (a diamond), we get a useful card. We can now put this number to good use and compare it with a similar ratio about the size of our bet.

After you've figured out how many cards you will need to win, the next step is to reduce an odds ratio of 38:9 to something more manageable such as 4:1. After you become familiar with pot odds, things like flush draws will be around 4:1. This step is not necessary. You will only need it occasionally.

2] Compare how big the bet is to the size the pot.

This title is pretty clear. Use the skills you have learned in the last step to determine a ratio that will allow you to determine the size of your bet and the size of your pot. In the ratio, simply add the total size of the pot (our opponent's stake + the original pot), and the bet amount second. Here are some quick examples:

$20 bet into a $100 pot = 120:20 = 6:1

$0.25 bet, resulting in a pot size of $1 = 1:10.25 = 4:1

$40 bet creating $100 total pot size = 100/40 = 2.5:1

You should have enough information to understand the second step. Let's assume that our opponent, with a $200 stack, has placed $20 in a $80 pot. That gives us odds of 5 to 1. (100 to 20). This will come in handy for the next step. online poker techniques how to play straight draws