As a daily sports better, you would probably understand what pot odds means and also understand the concepts involved. However, if you have ever played internet poker for any extended period of time, you probably realized very quickly that just understanding pot odds is not enough to be successful. What makes poker such an interesting game is that even the idea of pot odds has nuances that it takes lots of experience to completely understand.

The Problem with Pot Odds

The problem with pot odds is that you have incomplete information when you play poker. Sure, you may know that you're a little better than 5-to-1 to make your straight, but what if there are two hearts on the board? Now your straight card may make someone a flush and this may enter into your calculations.

Or, what if you flop top pair and are trying to decide how much to bet to give your opponent bad odds to draw at his hand? How can you do that if you don’t know what his hand is?

Pot Odds and Hand Distributions

To be successful at poker, both in cash game and poker tournament variations, you must learn how to combine pot odds with a hand distribution. Hand distributions are the range of hands an opponent is likely to hold.

To truly make a correct pot odds calculation, you must figure out your odds of winning vs. each hand in the likely hand distribution, combine those percentages and compare that to the pot odds.

Creating Hand Distributions

How can you determine this range of hands? You must start by estimating the average range of hands for an average player in the current situation. As you play, you must always be observing your opponents and should refine your hand ranges for each opponent for any given situation. If you play online, there is software that can help you do this.

Using Pot Odds and Hand Distributions in Games

It may seem like it is impossible to do so many calculations in the time you have to act on your hand. It will become increasingly easier with practice, but in reality, you don't need the exact figures and only usually need to make rough estimates in order to get the information that is necessary to be successful. You can also practice when playing at the best poker sites with different poker stats software, which gives likely winning percentages against distributions of hands that you select.