To understand pot odds you need only basic maths skills and you must be an ice cold person. Sometimes your heart will tell you must call, but you must ignore it and just use the pot odds if you want to make money on the long run. Everybody can make money in a single game and any tournament can be won by a fish because he got lucky, but in the end of the day only good players who understand and apply the odds correctly win money.

First you need to know what an out is. An out is a chance which will favor you in a determined combination. To put it simple let’s imagine to bet money in a coin toss. To win in this game you got 1 out of 2. A coin has heads and tails and your outs are 1 of 2. If you bet $100 against your opponent’s $100 you are getting a 50% of winning money and another 50% of losing, this means even odds and in the long run you will tie. Now, imagine a 6 faced dice and you bet to 1 number. You got 1 out of 6 to win in this game, so to make it profitable for you, you must win more than 6x your bet if your number hits. For example if somebody is such a fool to pay you 7x your bet each time you guess the number right, you will make money. Poker uses the same principle, but a little more complicated.

There are 52 cards in a poker deck and you got 2 in your hands, this means there are 50 unknown cards in the deck (those being held by your opponents count as well because you don’t know which cards they have), so now let’s put a common situation, where you are holding a pocket pair (77). There are 50 cards remaining and you got 2 7’s in your pocket, so only 2 more 7’s in the deck, the odds of another 7 hitting the table are 2 out of 50 for the first card of the flop, 2 out of 49 in the second and 2 out of 48 in the third. This averages 1 out of 24,5 on each card and a total of 1 out of 8 for the whole flop. By this, you will only call a preflop with a low pair if you have expectations of getting 8x your preflop bet… and this will only happen against maniacs, use this as a simple example, much more complicated calculations can be made with pot odds.