Calculating Odds

After a few days of cruising around cardschat checking out articles Im beginning to learn more and more about poker odds and how they are a fundemental principle of playing winning poker. Now I know that there are 'poker odds calculators' all over the net that you can use but I was wondering how people on this forum go about calculating these odds in your head. Playing online, you have about 10 seconds to roughly calculate pots odds, implied odds and decide weather it is worth putting your money in the pot.

I am generally ok at mathmatics but when it comes to calculating fractions I dont really have much idea what the best way of going about it is.

I guess what I want to know is, whats the easiest way to do it without writing anything down? 'or' do you store some implied odds in your memory (eg.the common odds at the bottom of this page) so you only need to quickly calculate pot odds and you will know from there.

Ok, well you can remember common situations to make it easier. For example you have ~20% 4:1 chance of hitting your four flush with one card to come, so if you are HU, and villain bets 1/3 pot you have immediate odds to call (1+(1/3):1/3)=4:1).....on a 1/2 pot bet, you would need to get another same sized bet on river.

This is of/c just to make the call break even if you have no other outs. Want to be able to get more from villains on river to make it profitable.

I've always found the x4 on the flop and x2 +1 on the turn a helpful formula to

remember. for example:with a flush draw on the flop you have 9 outs, in theory.

So you times your outs on the flop by 4, giving you a 36% chance to hit your

flush with 2 cards to come. If a blank comes on the turn you still have nine outs

but this time you times those outs by 2, and add 1.. Which gives you 19%.

These percentages are approx, but close enough for me in the heat of battle.

^^^Beat me to it.

The way I do it.
On the flop: Count the number of cards left in the deck that you feel will give you the winning hand, then multiply that number by 4.

On the turn: Count the number of cards left in the deck that you feel will give you the winning hand, then multiply that number by 2.

For example, on the flop if you have an open ended straight draw that's 8 cards that will give you the win. 8 X 4 = 32. So you'll win about 32% of the time, which is about 1/3 of the time.

On the turn, it's 8 X 2 = 16. So that's 16%, o1 1/6 of the time.

It gets trickier though. Let's say you have that open-ended straight draw but also have 4-to-a-flush. That's 7 more outs (there are 9 of the suit left, but two of those were already counted as the straight-draw outs so don't make the mistake of counting them again).

Thanks alot for such quick replies.

These are exactly what ive been after, just some simple ways to calculate these odds in my head

I think ill just stick to the very basics at the moment since Im only a couple of weeks into my poker career

Hey that video simplifies it just that much more. I think ill be coming back to this thread every day for the next month or so until I can get this going through my head automatically