Poke reduxFollow

Well of course it depends on HOW bad your cards suck. It also depends on how much you'll have to pay, and what your pot odds are.

Pot odds are what percentage of the pot your chips are going to compose. If there's $6 in the pot right now, and you have to pay $1 to call, your pot odds are 1/6. (If you want to get fancy you can try implied odds too, this estimates future bets). Obviously, if only one other person stays in, your pot odds will be worse, because the pot is smaller for what you have to put in. If no one folds before the flop, your pot odds are better because the pot grows.

Of course, you have to compare your pot odds to you card odds, or "number of outs." This is simply the chance that you'll hit the cards to give you the hand you want.

And of course, in low limit games, people play looser. If it only costs you a nickel to see the flop, why not?


You're not supposed to sit out the big blind. It's tantamount to cheating, as it's designed so that each person takes equal turns being forced to pay it.
The point of blinds and antes are to encourage betting, otherwise everyone would just fold all day until they got pocket aces.
I'm not sure, but I believe the reason blinds are preferred over antes is that you DO have the option to fold without losing any money, as long as you're not in the blind anyway. It's sort of a compromise between forced betting and being able to make the smart move of folding for free when you have garbage.

Well you have to calculate the odds. (This is why poker is mostly statistics and not sociology).
If you have 3 spades after the flop, you have to get 2 spades on the remaining 2 cards. Odds of this are (10/47)*(9/46) = .0416 or 4.16% or about 1/25. Compare that to your pot odds (and implied odds, since if a spade comes on the turn you have to bet again to see the river).

If you have 678 and are going for an outside straight, your odds are (8/47)*(8/46) + (8/47)*(4/46) = 0.0444 or 4.44% or about slightly better than 1/25.

(Not sure on these numbers, btw, I didn't think about it too much).

Edit: Also, since obviously calculating them this way is a tad difficult, most people just estimate by "number of outs" or how many cards remain in the deck that can make your hand.


I'll let smash or someone else field that one.




Edited, Sat Oct 9 19:07:51 2004 by trickybeck