Strategy with Kristy: Poker Math Part 2 with Aaron Wilt
This week on the Strategy with Kristy podcast, host Kristy Arnett brings Aaron "WiltOnTilt" Wilt back on the show to discuss how to use math in-game. After giving brief descriptions for the terms hand ranges, pot equity, and expected value, Wilt breaks down how he uses these variables to come up with decisions in spots that come up often in no-limit hold'em.
Here is a snippet from the interview:
Here's the situation: In a $5/$10 game, three players limp in. You're in the big blind with 5x2x. The flop is Ax4x10x rainbow. Action checks to button, who bets $10. The small blind calls. What do you do?
Basically, what I'm thinking here is that I have four outs to the nuts. If I was calling on just purely pot odds alone, I would need about 11-to-1 in order to break even. There were five callers preflop, that's $50, the button bet $10, that's $60 and the small blind called, that's $70. So I have to call $10 into $70. I'm currently getting 7-to-1, so I'm not getting the correct pot odds. Does that mean we should fold? I would say probably not because if we do it one of our three outs, there's a good chance we could probably get a little more money out. A lot of times, that's where people kind of stop. They'll say, "I'm getting the right implied odds though so I'll call." Well, I think it's worth going the next step and asking, "How much more, on average, do we need to make if we hit in order to make this call?" I'm getting 7-to-1 but I need to be getting 10-to-1. Each of those units is $10 so I need $40 or four more units. So I'd be asking myself, "When I hit a three, can I, on average, make an extra $40?" It seems like in this spot, when it goes bet-call, someones probably going to have an ace reasonably often here. It seems pretty likely that I can get a $40 bet out of one of them on either the turn or the river. I would go ahead and make the call there for that reason.
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