Poker Draws

Playing Your Draws

The key word to keep in mind to play your draws successfully is moderation. Draws are not made hands and they miss more often than they hit. Don't overdo it when it comes to playing your draws.

One of the biggest mistakes fish make besides playing too many hands is putting too much emphasis on their draws. When you chase draws against the odds, you are losing money. It may not look like you're losing money when you get lucky and hit a couple of draws in a row but the reality is that the odds are stacked against you. Any money you spend chasing a draw against the odds is money thrown right down the drain.

When deciding whether or not to play a draw, there are several things you want to consider:

Your pot odds

Other cards that could help you win the pot

The likelihood that your draw will win the pot

The visibility of your draw

Your position

The potential size of the pot

As you can see, playing draws properly requires a little more consideration than one would think. All of these factors contribute to how favorable of a drawing environment you are playing in. Let's take a quick look at each one of these factors:

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Your pot odds

The most important factor by a long shot is your pot odds. If you are getting the proper pot odds to chase a nut draw, none of the other factors matter. When you are getting the proper pot odds on a draw, it means you will make enough money the few times you complete your draw that it will more than make up for the rest of the times you miss your draw. I'll explain this in greater detail in the section titled "Pot Odds."

Other cards that could help you win the pot

Other cards that can help you win the pot are called "additional outs." Your chance of winning the hand increases with every additional out you have.

For example, say you have a spade flush draw with the AsKs in your hand. The board is showing 2sQs8d and you suspect your opponent has a hand like AQ or KQ for top pair. In this example you have a flush draw that has 9 outs. Additionally, you can catch any A or K to possibly make the best hand. There are 3 aces and 3 kings out there somewhere for a total of 6 additional outs and a grand total of 15 outs for the hand.

But wait, are you sure those additional Aces and Kings are outs that can win the hand for you? If your opponent has AQ for top pair, any ace is going to give you top pair but it will give him two pair. If your opponent does indeed have AQ, those Ace outs you counted were actually counterfeit outs and are very dangerous to you.

The same thing goes for your King outs if your opponent has KQ in his hand. A king on that board would give you TPTK which would look like a great hand but it would in reality be losing to your opponent's two pair.

On top of all that, you can't really be sure that your opponent only has top pair. You might suspect it but you won't know it until the showdown. If your opponent already has two pair, your additional outs won't help you.

If your opponent already has a set, you're in even more trouble than before. In this example, not only would your ace and king outs be worthless but any spade that pairs the board would give your opponent a full house while giving you a flush - a potentially very expensive situation.

All of this isn't to say you don't want additional outs, it just means you should be cautious when taking them into consideration. The fact is additional outs only increase your chances of winning the hand. The only problems come when we put too much faith in them.

The likelihood that your draw will win the pot

Drawing to a second best hand is an enormously expensive mistake so make sure the draws you're chasing are to the nuts. The last thing you want to do is spend money chasing a draw that wouldn't even have won the pot.

If the board has three cards of the same suit showing, you wouldn't want to chase a straight draw because someone could already have a flush. You also wouldn't want to chase a flush on a paired board because someone could already have a full house.

You should only chase draws when you're getting the right odds to do so and you're sure that the draw will win the pot for you.

The visibility of your draw

The visibility of your draw refers to how obvious it is. Draws that are somewhat hidden are more likely to be paid off than obvious draws. Flush draws tend to be the most obvious because everyone can see how many cards of each suit are on board.

Hands like double gutshot straight draws are a little harder to detect. A double gutshot straight is basically like having two inside straight draws at the same time. An example of a double gutshot straight would be holding 68 on a T74 board. Here any 5 or 9 would complete your straight.

Your position

It's much easier to play draws from late position than it is from early position. If you want a free card all you have to do is check behind if your opponents check first - which they will do often because they are out of position.

If you want a free card and are in early position, you just have to check and hope your opponents check behind you. If you check and they bet, you're usually going to have to throw away your draw. Sometimes you can bet from early position as a semi-bluff but that puts more money at risk and when done from early position you won't know if you're betting into a made hand or not.

The potential size of the pot

Your draws increase in value as the potential size of the pot increases. Estimating the potential size of the pot requires a little judgment so take extra care in being realistic. Taking the potential size of the pot into consideration is called estimating your implied pot odds and there is an entire section devoted to this topic coming up.

Pot Odds

The topic of pot odds isn't as complicated as it sounds so give this section a chance. It's an important thing to know because by using pot odds you can quickly determine whether or not it's profitable to chase a draw.

All pot odds are used for is to compare the size of a bet to the size of the pot. For example, say you're playing a no limit game and the pot is $9. If your opponent bets $1, the pot is now $10 and it costs you $1 to stay in. The pot odds in this situation would be expressed as 10:1.

If the pot is $20 and your opponent bets $10, your pot odds are 30:10 or more simply, 3:1. That's all there is to finding your pot odds.

Now that you know what your pot odds are, all you have to do is compare them to the odds of your draw completing.

Let's use another example to explain how we compare our pot odds to our drawing odds. Say you're playing in a $100 pot and you have a flush draw. Your opponent bets exactly $100 and you know that your pot odds are 200:100 or 2:1.

Now all you have to do is compare the odds of a flush draw to the pot odds you're getting. The odds of completing a flush draw are roughly 4:1. By comparing the 4:1 of your flush draw to the 2:1 of your pot odds, you see that your pot odds are worse than your drawing odds. If you're only getting 2:1 on a 4:1 draw, you can't call and expect to make a profit over the long run.

I'm going to use a long term example to show why you shouldn't call when the pot odds are against you. If you got into this exact same situation 100 times and called that $100 bet 100 times, you'd spend a total of $10,000 chasing. Out of those 100 times chasing, you would complete the flush draw and win the $200 pot 20 times for a total of $4,000 in wins. That works out to a loss of $6,000 over the course of those 100 situations.

If you didn't notice earlier, I just told you the odds of that flush draw earlier without telling you how I came up with that. Well, there are two ways to calculate the odds of your draws completing. One of them is very difficult; one of them is very simple and can be done at the table.

The difficult way to do this is to count your outs and use a long, complicated equation to find your odds. If you want to do it this way, you're going to have to look elsewhere because I don't even know what that equation looks like.

The easy way to calculate your drawing odds at the table is to just memorize the odds of a few of the more common draws and then memorize more over time. Here are the odds of some of the more common draws:

Flush Draw 4:1

Open Ended Straight Draw 5:1

Set to Full House 6:1

Gutshot Straight Draw 11:1

Two Pair to a Full House 11:1

Before we end this section, let's take a quick quiz to make sure you have this concept down. You can find the answers on the next page.

You have an open ended straight draw in a $200 pot and your opponent bets $100.

1. What are your pot odds?

2. What are your drawing odds?

3. Should you chase this draw?

1. After the opponent's bet, the pot is $300 and you have to call $100 to stay in. The pot odds are 300:100 which reduces down to 3:1.

2. A quick look at the odds chart above will tell you that the odds of an open ended straight draw completing are 5:1.

3. Since 3:1 pot odds are worse than 5:1 drawing odds, you should not chase this draw.

Implied Pot Odds

"Implied pot odds" builds upon the pot odds concept by taking future betting rounds into consideration when determining the profitability of a call. Implied odds are an estimate of how much money you think you can win if you complete your draw.

Say you're on a flush draw and your opponent has bet but you aren't quite getting the pot odds you need to chase it profitably. Let's also say that you somehow know that your opponent will bet a million dollars on the river no matter what card comes. It would be crazy not to call on the flop because you're getting massive implied odds on the call.

For a more realistic example let's pretend that you have a flush draw in a $100 pot. If your opponent bets $50, you'd be getting 3:1 on a 4:1 draw which isn't good enough to call. But let's say you estimate that if you complete your draw, you can get your opponent to call a $100 bet on the river.

This is where your implied odds come into play. To calculate your implied odds, all you do is add your estimated future bet to the size of the pot. After your opponent's $50 bet, the current pot size is $150. If you add that $100 river bet that you're planning on making, the final size of the pot you stand to win is $250.

Your implied odds in this example are 250:50 or more simply 5:1. Since your implied odds are greater than 4:1 you can now profitably chase this draw.

The one major weakness of the implied odds concept is that it's based on an estimate. Poker players, being the positive bunch that we are, tend to get a little overoptimistic when estimating our implied odds.

What you absolutely do not want to do is use exaggerated implied odds as justification for making bad calls. Before you make a call based on your implied odds, make sure you have a strong reason to believe your opponent will call a big bet on the river if you hit your draw.

People make bets with all types hands so don't assume they'll call your bets every time you hit your draw. You really need to have a good reason to believe your opponent has a strong hand and will call your bet.

Reverse Implied Odds

Reverse implied odds is a term used to describe the situation in poker where completing your draw is the worst possible outcome. Completing a draw can be a terrible thing if you're drawing to a second best hand.

Let's say you have Ah Kh and are drawing to a flush on a board of 4h4sQh. If your opponent has pocket queens for the flopped full house, the worst thing that can happen is you hit a third heart. By drawing to second best hands not only are you wasting money chasing for no reason but when you do hit you're going to lose even more money.

The lesson in this section is to never chase draws that aren't to the nuts. Don't chase draws to straights if there could already be a flush out there and don't draw to anything if the board is paired. You lose in every possible way when you chase draws that aren't to the nuts.

The problem with chasing non-nut draws even extends to the few times you get lucky enough to hit your draw and your opponent doesn't already have you beat. If you catch a flush on a paired board, do you think your opponent is going to put much money in the pot with something that will pay you off? Not a chance. Your opponent will be too worried about the full house and flush possibilities out there to put any money in with something like top pair.

Reverse implied odds also come into play when the one card you need to complete your draw is the same card your opponent needs to complete a better draw. For example, if you're holding 89 on a 3TJ board a queen will complete your straight but if your opponent has AK, that same queen would give him a better straight. The same thing goes for flush draws. If you're chasing a low flush at the same time an opponent is chasing a higher flush, you're going to be in big trouble if you hit the card you want.

It's easy to avoid the reverse implied odds situation if you only chase draws to the nuts. As you get started in poker, I highly recommend you stick to that strategy. Eventually you'll be able to use your hand reading skills to chase weaker draws when you know your opponent has a big pair or whatever.

But for now, the lesson remains the same: never chase draws that aren't to the nuts.