[aliensyndm]

OK from a pure maths point of view, the answers are...

Call in 3, 4 and 6 and fold the rest.

As people have said, you wanna work out how many outs you have.
OK so any 9 or any A. That's 8 outs altogether.
You're drawing to an open ended straight draw.
Now if you have learnt your pot odds/drawing hand percentages you'll instantly know you have a 17.4% chance of making this hand, or 4.75 to 1 chance. Obviously you don't need to learn it exactly, a close approximation is fine. Or as the article suggests with jsut the river to come you can double the amount of outs you have and add 2 to get the percentage.. Hence (8 x 2) + 2 = 18% That's pretty close to the actual figure of 17.4%
i would suggest you learn the straight and flush draw chances first as they are very common scenarios.

Anyway it's a 17.4% chance.

Now you have to look at each pot indivdually and figure out whether it's worth putting money into it. Forget whatever money you've already put into the pot. If it's in the pot, it's not yours anymore.

Scenario 1 - Player A's $6 bet and the original $6 make for a pot of $12.
It's costing you $6 to win this $12. You need odds of 4.75 to 1.
Are you getting these odds ? Hopefully it should be obvious straight away that you are not. You are only getting odds of 2 to 1. Hence fold.

Scenario 2 - PLayer A and B's money + original pot = $18
Now you have to call $6 to win an $18 pot. What kind of odds does this give you ? Is it anywhere near the 5 to 1 you need ?(note I've rounded the 4.75 to 1 up there just to make it a little simpler).
$6 to win $18 is only odds of 3 to 1, hence fold.

Scenario 3 - Player A,B,C,D and Es' money plus original pot = $36
$6 to win $36. Are you getting odds here ? You are getting 36 to 6, which by simplifies down to 6-1. We know from before you need at least 4.75 to 1 to make a call here. As you are getting greater odds than the required 4.75 to 1, you call.

Scenario 4 - PLayer A's money plus orignal pot = $7
$1 to win $7. 7 to 1 odds. You call.

Scenario 5 - Player A's money plus original pot = $21
$15 to win $21. Now you are getting odds of 21 to 15.
Clearly this is nowhere near the 4.75 to 1.
This large bet is the kind of bet you would make if you had a very strong hand after the turn to make it expensive for people to draw against you and give them bad odds. As you can see from the above examples...bet $1 and they have odds to draw. Bet $15 and their odds are horrid.

Scenario 6 - PLayer A,B,C,D,Es' money plus original pot = $81
$15 to win $81. This is idds of 81 to 15. Now in this scenario the maths don't work out all nice and neat the way they did in the other ones so you gotta work it out. One way is to keep a calculator handy and use that.
Fine if you are playing online, not quite so handy in live games.
So you really need to be able to get some sort of approximation in your head.
Quite how isn't important as long as it's quick and it's accurate.

There what I would suggest is think about what money you would need.
OK $15 it costs. I need odds of approximately 5 to 1 for this call to be worthwhile ok ? So I need 5 times more money in the pot than it costs me to call the bet. 5 x 15 = 75. Is there $75 or more in the pot ? Yes there is $81, hence call.

This pot also has great implied odds. Implied odds are bets that are likely to go in the pot in the near future. In scenario 6 after you call there's gonna be a fair amount of cash in the pot. If you make your hand you are guranteed to win it. But you are also guranteed to win any other bets and for a pot that size it is very likely there will be more bets in an attempt to win the pot.
Also if someone has a hand that is very hard to get off, like say someone made 666 on the turn.......it's gonna be a tough play for them to fold such a large pot with a hand like that. If the pot was for $6 of course.....are they gonna stick their whole stack in to win it ? No. When the pot's for $81, it's a bit harder to get off.


Ok people seem to have done pretty well there. That's the basic kinda idea in it's simplest form. Keep an eye out during your play and see if you can notice things like this. Also if you are playing cash watch for people who draw cards to hands like flushes and straights when there are no odds for them.
You want these people to be calling your bets when you have a hand and they are drawing. Sure it's annoying when they hit yes, but you have to make sure you don't pay off their hand when they do hit. But there's plenty more times when they won't hit, and this is what makes you money - people calling bets without odds.


Obviously things get alot more complicated than that and there are many other factors to consider than just the maths. In the above example it was nice cos you were guranteed to win if you hit your hand. Had there been a flush draw out as well it can get messy. Had it been on the flop with 2 cards still to come it's all a bit different. Anyway I gotta jam for a bit but I'll post up some more later and see how yoy get on with them.