PLO Pot Odds and Key Factors to Drawing Correctly

When it comes to drawing in community card games, the key things to keep track of are the pot odds, and the hero's equity in the pot. Lets define these two terms further.

Pot Odds

In poker games, pot odds are the ratio of the current size of the pot to the cost of the contemplated call. The ratio that you receive once you do this simple division problem is very useful to other things. One example is, figuring out if you are getting the right price on future calls and if your play is +Expected Value or -Expected Value.

Finding our pot odds:

This is the simple one, so lets knock it out first.

When you are facing a raise on any street; take all the money that is currently in the pot, and add to that the bet you are facing, then divide this total by the bet you are facing. These are your immediate pot odds.

Total pot + your potential call of villains' bet

---------------

villain's bet

=

pot odds

Quick example of pot odds:

Pot of 20$ on the turn, the villain bets 5$. What are your pot odds?

Solution;

25$ (adding villains' 5$ bet since he cannot take that bet back) + 5$ (your potential call)

---------------------------------

5$ (your potential call) 

=

6-1 or 16.7% are your direct pot odds here. 

Simple, huh? Now, lets move on.

Finding our equity

This one is a bit tougher, so follow along! To find our equity in the pot at any given part of the hand we need to know two things.

• a. We need to know our hand. (Easy!)
• b.We need to know villain's exact hand(Eeek). Or their range of hands. (Oh lord)

Sounds like a truckload of work! But you're in luck! In PLO people tend to nut peddle, so if you put villain on the nuts when they're mashing the pot button, you're probably not too far off!

I suggest starting with this approach and once you get better at putting villain on medium strength, and weak hands you can assign him an accurate range.

Example

But lets start by putting villains who are potting it on hands they probably have! (The nuts.) Below is an example from my training video short of a real hand that happened at PLO100.

We are on the button with jj89. Three handed to the flop, 10usd in the middle, we have the pre flop aggression.

Playing against two villains on a tjq flop. We have both villains covered.

The BB leads pot right into us. Without going too much into it we can assume he has AxKxXxXx no re draw.

Now that we know his exact hand and our exact hand we can figure out our pot equity!

Calculating our pot equity

We need to plug these numbers into a pot limit omaha equity calculator. I recommend using the best free one at; http://www.propokertools.com/simulations

Plugging our numbers into the calculator, we find out that our hand has 36.71% equity and he has 63.29% equity in the pot.

This is the part of the pot that rightfully belongs to us/him according to the strength of the hand. It is also how often we will win this pot. This is the part of the game where math becomes important and brushing up on the maths will yield results.

Putting it in to practice

One way I recommend practicing is to have one table up and go over spots you thought were close. These close spots you can mark down with an asterisk so you can go back to them after the session or during a break when you sit out. I sometimes do this in live plo games as well, if i thought the spot was super interesting or close, I just go to the coach and take a break and go over the spot with a calculator.

For more in depth examples of this process please check out my video on PLO drawing. I put theory into practice and go over my methodology during a live one table session. 

Make sure to check our Omaha Poker Rules page and First time Strategy Tips. Enjoy.