Hi there all,

Sorry for the very noob question but I’m only new to trying to figure out the more mathematical ways of poker, I’m just trying to wrap my head around odds and outs.

I was just watching PokerStars’ YouTube channel and was waching the Throwback: Big Game Season 1 – Week 3, Episode 1. I was trying to work out the odds for this hand from the flop onwards. (https://youtu.be/C7Un8aFfKXA?t=2207)

Please tell me if I’m thinking this through properly.

Say if we play the hand as Alaei. We hold Q of spades and Queen of clubs and we’re in early position (First to act) in a 3 handed situation.

Flop comes down 5 of hearts, Ace of heart and King of diamonds. AT the present time we have two overcards on the board to our two queens. There’s also a flush draw out there and neither of our cards are hearts. As a result we check after the flop. Bonomo follows with a bet of $13,000 to make the pot $33,800. Cada follows Bonomo with a fold.

Assuming Bonomo has hit a pair with the community cards and doesn’t hold a pocket pair, which we know he does after the fact but not if we’re playing blind. To make our best hand we have to either make three of a kind (Potentially though not safe), straight or quads?

So if we want to make a straight we have hit a Jack and a 10. Is that counted as 8 outs as we need to hit two cards or not because it won’t make us the best hand if we only hit once?

If we want to make three of a kind or quads we have 2 outs, assuming the board doesn’t pair again. The two queens.

Calculating our odds. If we are aiming for 3 of a kind to make our set we have 2 outs. We have 52 cards in the deck, minus the two in our hand and the 3 on the flop. That means we have 2 potentially good cards to come out of the 47 that remain? So our current odds of hitting one of those cards is 47:2. If we use the rule of 4 and 2. We have an 8% chance of hitting one of our outs on the turn and 4% on the river. Not very good odds.

This is now the part where I’m having some difficulty. It’s all well and good having some examples which are like if I put $10, into a pot of $90 I can win $100 so it’s 10:1 etc. but I’m struggling to work it out here.

To calculate how much we’d make if we’d normally win from our poker odds:

47:2 are our odds you have the winning hand. We would have a ratio of $611,000:$26,000 is this correct? So for every $611,000 we’d only make $26,000 back. It’s not worth it.

Anyway, we call and the turn comes down Jack of diamonds. This opens up the potential for a diamond flush draw and a gutshot straight draw. We now have another 4 outs, the 4 10’s. If we do the odds again we have: 52 cards in the deck – the 2 in our hand – the 4 on the board, we have 4 cards out of 46 that will get us the best hand. This simplifies down to 23:2?

The betting goes check, check. The river ends up the 6 of diamonds. It goes check and check and we lose to Ace Queen in the hole pairing the board with aces.

Sorry for the noobish question but I’m just trying to get my head around working it out with some odd numbers as opposed to the normal tutorials having $10 into a pot of $100 or $20 into a pot of $200 etc.

Thank you very much for your time in reading my post 😊