Understanding Being "Pot
Committed"
Poker is a game where
many people have little understanding, and few
people have great knowledge. This is exhibited
often at the table by people making a horrendous
call and saying, "I'm
pot committed". Being
pot committed is one of the most misunderstood
concepts in poker. To understand what being
pot-committed is, and knowing when you are, you
are going to need to understand a few concepts.
Knowing Pot Odds
Your pot odds are easy to
figure out in any given hand. I you have a hand
that is going to get "made"
3 times out of 10, or 30% of the time, then it
will obviously be losing the other 70% of the
time. With a hand like this, you need the proper
pot odds to make a call. For every one dollar
that you have to call, there needs to be at
least three dollars in the pot. This way, you
can lose the hand two out of three times, and
still be profitable. You never want to draw to a
hand without the correct odds.
Understanding
Implied Odds
Implied odds can be
understood as the money that you can count on
being put into the pot after you have acted in
your turn. Theses are a lot harder to understand
in no limit poker, than they are in limit poker
due to varying bet sizes. In limit poker, you
know the bet sizes, which makes it great for
practicing implied odds. In no limit poker,
implied odds can be explained through what I
call the domino effect.
The Domino
Effect
When you have a good idea
of your opponents overall playing style, and are
aware that the players acting behind you love to
get into multi-way pots due to odds that have
the potential to get big, then you can get an
idea of your odds before the flop.
You are in early
position with seven players left to act behind
you, and the opponent on your right makes a
small raise. When you make the call, it starts
this domino effect at the table. The player to
act next may understand what’s going to happen,
so he makes the call as well, with a marginal
hand. After you two, the next player is getting
three-to-one on his money, not including the
blinds, and every player behind them is getting
even better odds on their money. This means you
are going to see people continue to call with
trash hands. So in this situation, you initially
did not have the correct pot odds to make the
call, however, you did have the correct implied
odds, which makes the call a profitable one.
Being
Pot-Committed
This is a term we
all hear far too often in poker. People often
make terrible calls and justifying it by saying
they are pot committed, when in reality they may
not even be able to spell pot committed, let
alone know what the term means in regards to the
hand. This is one of the most heated discussions
there is, are you really ever pot committed if
you know you hold the losing hand?
As an example, you have
an up and down straight draw on the flop and it
never improves, however the river brings a third
heart. You only have $75 left, and there is $400
in the pot. There are two other opponents in the
hand, one goes all in, and the other follows,
both have a few hundred in front of them. Here,
you are getting incredible odds, where you are
only going to have to win rarely for it to be
profitable, but you know you have no chance of
winning. Yes, monetarily you are pot committed;
however you are not hand committed. Do you see
the difference? When it is impossible for you to
win, no matter how good the odds are, you should
throw it away. Now you will not see the odds get
that crazy that often, and being pot-committed
should be used to an extent. It is up to you to
determine that extent of them dependent on your
own skill level and the reads you have on your
opponents.
Beware of
Distorted Odds
Poker players are becoming
more and more aggressive, and you see a lot more
big bets being made at the wrong times. Here is
an example.
You hit the flop with 6
player's total, and
you hit a middle flush draw. At this point,
there is fifty dollars in the pot. Four players
check, and the person to your immediate right
makes it $30 to go, leaving his stack with $100.
You make it $80 total, and everyone folds to the
original better who goes all in for $50 more.
The pot is at $260, and you have the pot odds to
call because you are getting around five-to-one
on your call. So where did the odds get
distorted?
Well, everyone checked
the flop, and the original bettor made it
thirty, to which everyone was probably going to
fold anyway seeing as how they checked to begin
with. Your raise basically limits your opponents
play to either folding, or pushing all in. His
moving all in is what limits your play to
calling. If you had not distorted the odds with
your original raise, then you would never have
to get over $120 in on a draw because you would
have not created the odds for yourself. Half of
the money in the pot is yours, and while though
poker is not a game that should be results
oriented, it is hard to ignore.
While calling the
"all in"
in this situation is indeed correct, you should
have never been in that situation to begin with.
You never had odds to chase your draw to begin
with. It's a
"you made your bed,
now you sleep in it"
type of situation.
Many players hate
folding draws, and experienced players who love
to gamble will make this play to distort the
odds so that they can be able to justify it to
themselves. This is a bad idea and in the long
run will be a detriment to your bankroll. Play
the odds straight forward and you will almost
always be profitable!
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