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
This is where estimating comes into play.
This is where estimating comes into play. When you are playing, you may find it tedious to constantly calculate your exact pot odds. Most of the time, it isn’t even necessary to calculate your pot odds. Suppose you are getting something around 6-to-1 and you know you will win 30 percent of the time. There is no point in doing the math because you should know that 30 percent is way better than 6-to-1. If there are two 500-chips, seven 100-chips, and 15 25-chips in the pot and you have to call two 500-chips, you can estimate this by seeing the two 500-chips in the pot plus around 1,000 in other chips. So, you will be getting around 3-to-1 because you have to put in 1,000 chips, and the pot contains about 2,000 chips plus the 1,000 your opponent bet. You don’t have to count out each individual chip. As long as your estimates are fairly accurate, this should work with few problems and save you a lot of mental energy.
Another important concept is implied odds.
Another important concept is implied odds. Assume you and your opponent both have 1,000 chips, and you have 8-4 on a 9-6-2 board. If the pot is 100 chips and your opponent bets 100 chips, you are getting 2-to-1, which isn’t good enough to call based purely on pot odds because you will only get to see one card. You will improve to a flush roughly 20 percent of the time, so you need 4-to-1 to call. Despite this, you should still call because you can expect to win money on future betting rounds if you hit your hand. So, even though you are getting 2-to-1 in immediate pot odds, assuming you know your opponent will get all-in by the river, you are actually getting 11-to-1, because if you hit your hand you can expect to win the other 900 chips in his stack.