Hank quotes Abdul and then makes the following comment:
It takes a while to be comfortable calculating odds and outs at the table, but rules of thumb are easy to remember. The above rules allow you to play your draws confidently and profitably. Note that you can profitably call with gutshot draws on the flop in many circustances, which goes against conventional poker wisdom (“and son, never draw to an inside straight”). Of course, your implied odds have to be better than 11:1 unless you have other outs.
I thought it noteworthy because I remember watching a female pro (who I can’t for the life of me remember her name) who said (caution, liberal paraphrasing to follow): “I can’t do all that complicated math in my head. If there’s a lot of money in the pot and I have good cards, I call.”
What works for me may not work for everyone but I’ve always used the following method:
X = number of outs
Y = Unseen cards
Y-X/X = Odds
So let’s say you flop a flush draw.
47 (unseen cards 52 – 3 on the flop and two in your hand) – 9 outs (there are 13 suited cards in a deck, you have two and the board has two which leaves 9) / 9 = 4.2
Some charts list it as 4.1 and if you use the formula of 2x the number of outs to give you a percentage (18%), that’s a little more than to 4.2:1. Bottom line is that if you can quickly do the math in your head; 47 minus 9 is 38 [sorry earlier typo corrected] and 9 goes into 38 approx. four times. You don’t have to be dead on. If it’s 8 outs and you calculate 47 – 8 = 39, 8 goes into 40, 5 times so 8 goes into 39 slightly less than 5 times (4.875 to be exact) but 5:1 is close enough to be a good guideline.
Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of the time you don’t need to do complicated math at the table. Mostly, it’s rules of thumb.
For a flush or OESD (or Belly Buster) figure 4 or 5 : 1
If you have two pair and you’re trying to make a full house, you have 11:1 odds.
If you have a small pocket pair that you played hoping to flop a set and missed, you need 22:1 odds to call the flop (assuming a full table). Think about that for a moment.
You can figure out the rest of the common scenarios you find might yourself in but the message is that if you figure out the basic odds for a few key situations, you can ballpark everything else. For instance, if you know that 9 outs (a flush draw) is 4:1 odds, you know that you need about 5:1 odds to call 8 outs.
[Update] Wow, I was completely spacing when I wrote the original and some of the numbers/math were off. That’s been corrected.
[Update 2] Richard Brodie points out that the above mentioned poker pro quote is from Maureen Feduniak.