Why You Need to Know Your Long Term Odds

Profitability in poker depends on consistent and repetitive quality decisions. Often times, when in a hand that requires intricate odds calculations, you have to look at each individual situation in the long term perspective. That means taking a particular hand into account and stretching that exact situation into hundreds, even thousands of hands.

Professional players who rely on making money day-in and day-out understand this concept implicitly, and it used that knowledge to either get out of the hand or stay in it, sometimes right to the end. As a side benefit, this type of long-term odds knowledge is an excellent tool to avoid tilt, while keeping cool as weaker players make incredible suck outs or win despite poor odds.

What kind of odds do you have to understand in order to comprehend long-term odds profitability?  Well, I'm not just referring here to win odds, nor just to pot odds, but there are other factors, which you can consider odds scenarios as well.  For instance, what are the odds of my opponent calling his whole stack off if I make might not draw? How about this - what are the odds of one of the players behind me re-raising my call?  What are the odds that they will re-raise all in?  What are the odds if my opponent simply bet a draw, or bet on a hand with nothing at all?

As you can see, there are long-term odds that are rather simple to calculate, and there are long-term odds that can only be calculated in a theoretical sense. Those theoretical odds calculations can take years to become reasonably proficient at deciphering. If that's not concerning enough to you, then consider these types of theoretical odds decisions being made in a matter of seconds, facing some serious aggression from your opponents - for real money. If you have ever been in a no limit cash came lately, these types of scenarios are not just common, but expected.

One of the ways you can help yourself in understanding some of these long term odds scenarios, is to be using a poker calculator when playing online.  When you can keep tabs on your opponent as to profiling factors such as aggression factor, went to showdown winning percentage, voluntarily putting money into the pot, and stack size, you are much more likely to be able to put together the whole story of what is really going on, and make informed - and usually profitable decisions.

What all poker players can agree on is that the more information you have about your opponents, the more likely you are to make the correct plays against them.  As popular as poker calculators are these days, the majority of players still do not use them. If you multitable or multitask, you simply cannot outperform the tracking abilities of an poker calculator and you are not a winning all the pots you could be.