Tournament Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
Say you have A-4 on a 9-6-2 board. Your opponent goes all-in. Should you call?
Say you have A-4 on a 9-6-2 board. Your opponent goes all-in. Should you call? The answer depends entirely on your pot odds. If you assume your opponent has a hand that is 9-8 or better, meaning he will always have at least top pair, and he never has a flush draw, which may or may not be true, you will win around 42 percent of the time. Again, you can figure this out using a poker hand-equity calculator. In this situation, you need to get around 1.4-to-1 to break even. If you think you are better than the opponents at your table, you need slightly better odds than break-even. If you think you are worse than your opponents, you need slightly worse than break-even. So, if you are getting even money, meaning the pot is $100 and you have to call $100, which usually won’t happen in holdem, you should fold. If the pot is $120 and you have to call $100, meaning you need to win 45 percent of the time, you should also fold. This is solved by 100/220 = 45 percent. Say you think you are as good as your opponents, so you need to win 42 percent of the time.
You can solve for this with the equation 42 percent = 0.42 = 100/(100 + x).
You can solve for this with the equation 42 percent = 0.42 = 100/(100 + x). Then you have 42 + 0.42x = 100, so x = 58/0.42 = 138. So, the pot has to have 138 chips in it to make it worth your call, assuming the bet is 100.