For my first article, I want to talk about one of the biggest breakthroughs of my nine-year, poker journey: understanding reverse implied odds.

Back in 2004, I was 14 years old and grinding out enough money to get me through the weekend by playing $10 tournaments with my brother’s friends. After watching a young Daniel Negraneau’s play, I tried to emulate what I saw on ESPN. Hands like 9-8 suited started to get me as excited as looking down at two aces.

It wasn’t until I started reading strategy on twoplustwo.com that I started to understand why certain hands worked for the pros but not for me. The one thing that I had never considered was the size of my stack relative to the blinds. The idea of reverse implied odds is that the strength of a hand you have pre-flop is dependent upon the size of your stack.

Having large reverse implied odds is when you put yourself in a spot where you are either going to win a small pot or lose a big one (which is not where you want to be). Let’s say you have a 50 big blind stack and raise A-9. Someone calls and the flop comes 2-7-9. This spot is extremely hard to play. You are not going to get into an enormous pot unless someone has a hand that beats you (over pairs or sets). When you are winning, your opponent will not pay you off very frequently (they might just fold a hand like 6-6 or K-Q). Even if the flop comes A-7-2, you are only going to get a lot of action if an opponent is beating you with a hand like A-Q or A-K. As you get more and more chips relative to the blinds, the value of a hand like A-9 goes down and becomes unprofitable to play.

Contrast that to a hand like 7-8 suited which has low reverse implied odds. You are only going to hit a straight or flush around 18% of the time. Because of this, it is not a good hand when you don’t have very many chips. If you only have 15 big blinds, you might have to put in 3 big blinds to see the flop. When you miss the flop (which will happen most of the time), you’ve just lost 20% of your stack. However, if you have a 50 big blind stack, when you hit a straight or flush you can easily double up if the opponent flops a hand like two pair or top pair top kicker. This is the reason why pros will go all-in pre-flop for a short stack (8 or 9 big blinds) with A-9 but will fold 7-8 suited, but they will fold A-9 pre-flop but play 7-8 suited when they have a larger stack. With a short stack, the value of an ace puts you ahead of hands like K-Q or K-J.

However, it is very hard to imagine a flop where you can double up with A-9 against K-Q if you have a 50 big blind stack.

There are a near infinite amount of variables that should go into every decision you make at the poker table. One of these key variables is looking at your stack size and determining which hands to avoid because they have a high amount of reverse implied odds and will only cause you to lose big pots.

Jonathan Schoder won $236,921 at the 2012 WSOP Main Event. He is a student at Emory University in Atlanta, GA.

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