Expected Value in Online Poker Expected value is a term commonly used in online poker. Good players consider expected value in conjunction with poker hand odds when deciding what plays to make and even what games to choose or what limits to play. It's important to understand expected value if you are going to be a successful online poker player. Expected Value Plays The basics of calculating odds in Texas Holdem and other poker games are fairly easy. Once you have the fundamentals pinned down, you will often use the term expected value to refer to how much you can expect to win, either on a particular hand or in a particular period of time.

If you call a $5 bet to win a $20 pot that you will win 20 percent of the time, your expected value is $20(20%)-$5(80%)=0, meaning both calling and folding are correct. Another way to look at this is that you are a 4-to-1 underdog and you are being offered 4-to-1 odds by the pot, so you break even in the long term. Expected Value for Players When expected value is used to refer to a player's results, it simply means how much the player is likely to win or lose over time. For example, you like to play $20 sit-and-go poker tournaments, for which first prize is $100, second prize is $60 and third prize is $40. If you win two out of every ten sit-and-gos, come in second once and third once, your expected value is $10 per sit-and-go. There are two ways to calculate this. You can add up all your wins, subtract the total cost of the sit-and-go's and divide by the number of sit-and-go's: 2($100)+60+40=$300. $20(10)=$200. ($300-$200)/10=$10. You can also take the real value of each tournament and divide by the number of sit-and-gos: $100-$20 + $100-$20 + $60-$20 + $40-$20 +6(0-$20)=$100. $100/10=$10. Using EV in Poker The calculation above tells you that playing $20 sit-and-gos is profitable, as you make $10 in the long term for every one of these that you play. However, 10 trials is not anywhere near a sufficient sample, and you will need to play many more sit-and-gos before you can realistically approximate your expectation.