NL Holdem - Applying Pot Odds to Tournament Play
I will make the assumption here that you all know how to calculate pot odds. If you are playing in a ring game then aside from advertising plays that is just about all you need to know when considering calling a bet that risks all your chips IF you know what the other player has got. This is of course assuming that you have plenty of money that you DIDN’T take with you to the table. If it is your last 10$ then you have to consider the opportunity cost of risking your money on that hand. Anyway Standard pot odds in an all in situation are: Formula 1: simple pot odds
Call if FV(chips if fold)1 You will see other ways of this being presented but they all amount to the same thing. In tournament play the situation is different if you are in a freezeout situation. If you bust out you cannot rebuy or redeposit – you are OUT! Two factors affect the standard calculation of pot odds. Firstly the opportunity cost of risking being busted out. If you are in a 5$ MTT early on and are offered a 50/50 early on with a small amount extra in the pot you have to realize that 10 hands later you may well get the opportunity of a double up on a 70/30 – MUCH more lucrative. Secondly say 3000 chips rather than 1500 is not generally worth twice as much as 1500 if you had to put a real money value on your chip stack. At its simplest you will have tournament pot odds to call a bet putting you all in if you take Formula 1 but replace the Call value with the $$ value of chip stack if call and replace Fold value with the $$ value of your chip stack if you fold. Formula 2: Real $$ tournament pot odds
Call is (money value of chip stack if fold) < (money value of chips is call * chance of winning) =( odds) The problem with this is it all gets very wooly. How do you assess the “real” value of a particular chip stack at a particular stage of a tournament? Say you double up in the first hand of a 10$+1 2 table tournament. If you could sell this situation to someone is it worth 22 dollars? It is hard to put real values to this, hard but not impossible. There is precious little said about this by poker theorists. David Sklansky does say that every additional chip is generally worth less than the last and does suggest that risking busting out is best avoided but there is little by way of a mathematical approach taken to this situation. We can safely say that if you do not have pot odds for a call it will rarely be justifiable to call. It is possible that other factors such as time, a good situation for exploiting a big chip stack, knocking out a serious threat, being the weakest player left in the tournament etc could make a borderline call acceptable but you would not want to argue it in court. I take the view that you have to adjust your willingness to call a bet that you have pots odds for but could knock you out by the following factors:- *the general quality of your opponents and the style of game they play,
*exploitable reads you have on them less those they have on you,
*size of blinds,
*payout structure in the tourney and
*some other factors as seem important But whilst these factors are hard to put accurate money values on the following is not… Assume you are in a 5$+1 three table tourney on party poker AND that first gets all the money. If all you do is risk 50/50's with people with the same chip stack and your chips don’t alter otherwise (impossible I know but useful for the mathematical model) if you play 900 tourneys you will win 30 (4500) and it will cost you 4500 in stake and 900 in rake. NOT VERY GOOD - most people think a 50/50 is an ok call in this sort of tourney without any other chips in the pot. But it is clearly not. It is not necessarily terrible but it is certainly not something to be pleased about and will generally have a negative expected value. Assuming that you are not able to exploit a chip stack into being worth more chips from bullying then you want 6/5=1.2 or greater - so if it is a 50/50 you need 200 in pot already if you have 1000 chips remaining otherwise calling is clearly bad. Everything else being equal (all those wooly factors canceling each other out or not applying) you will need at least the following to call:- Formula three: House share bias adjustment
Buy in including house rake / buy in excluding rake With a few exceptions this will be 1.1 – which can be called the real expected odds requirement or “the golden number”. The more experienced you get the more you will automatically “know” what the real $ value of any stage in a tournament is. Until then the “golden number” is a useful tool. You may well feel that the wooly factors may cause you to change the number that you require from the CV/FV calculation to decide whether making a call is worthwhile. If the blinds are very high and you are either early on in a tourney with lots of people left or there is little incentive to fold into places other than first then you may legitimately call when the number is less than the real expected odds requirement. Similarly if the blinds are low, there is scope for good profit folding to the money and you have lots of exploitable reads then folding will be best unless CV/FV is pretty high. I have only dealt with the varying chip stacks of your opponents indirectly in these “wooly” factors. If you have 20 people left in a big tournament and there are three players who all evenly hold around 80% of the entire tourney chips – you are often best avoiding these players entirely. Whilst you might be able to profit from playing hands with them if they are risk adverse or if you have good exploitable reads on them you really don’t want to risk getting knocked out by them. Sometimes the best way of avoiding deciding whether you have pot odds to call your all in situations is simply to avoid them in the first place! Generally though you will need CV/FV>“the golden number” (1.1) for a call to be correct. You will often be in situations where you have something like AKos and after a small raise in early position someone reraises you all in. Using the criteria I have set the answer will often be NO! OK think how likely is it that they have AQ, KQ, Ajs etc(i.e. you are a good favorite) – if we assume that this is a fairly high buyin that we are talking about against solid players it will not be that likely. This must also be countered by the chance that they have AA, KK (you are a dog) etc. Lets just say you knew they held 66 – without there being much added in the pot you should fold this re-raise if calling would put you all in. You would need CV/FV to be greater than 1.1 (everything else being equal) to justify calling. The more likely holdings such as AQ etc are likely the more you can call but against fairly strong opponents with a reasonable stake in the game you will frequently find folding AK and AQ to a huge raise to be the correct course of play. Many will erroneously only do so if they believe their opponent has KK or AA (how many times have we seen QQ v AK showdowns though) but really EVEN if there is a few chips in the pot folding AK to any PP will generally be the correct course of play. Finally you will note that this all applies whether you are chasing something where you are 90% favorite or where you are 10% favorite- however one of the key wooly factors that I have perhaps underestimated is what opportunities will you be throwing away if you call and lose. Getting better than 50% odds isn’t that hard in medium level buy ins once the blinds start to get high similarly if YOU are the one going all in there is also the chance that your opponent will fold. The converse of course is if you are in a situation where the blinds are really high and the other players are strong loose aggressive players. If you are waiting for CV/FV>1 you might have a long wait on your hands. The “opportunity costs” of calling is clearly important in assessing these wooly factors. It will become apparent as you try to assess the and that they are far easier to assess for small tourneys (1 table, 2 table etc) than for big tourneys. This is something that does get easier with experience however. I would be interested to here feedback on this and also if anyone has a more scientific way of calculating these so called “wooly factors”. Playing poker is obviously not all about doing mathematical calculations but anything that helps improve the decision making of players is worth considering. REMINDER
Whilst will ALWAYS be correct to use almost everything else here only applies to calls that will knock you out if you lose (or cripple your stack so that it amounts to the same thing). Whilst you will generally still require CV/FV<1 in calling other people’s all ins and you need to remember that every extra chip is generally worth less than the last you do not need to use the golden number as the basis of your calculations.
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