The Rule of 4 2
There are a lot of things to concentrate on when playing a game of poker: the style of your opponents, their betting patterns, the size of bets that they usually fold to … the list goes on.
As we’ve seen in an earlier article, calculating Pot Odds should be one of the first things that a player does when weighing up whether to play a hand or not. Unfortunately though, this isn’t always the case and the pressure of a large hand can lead players to calculate their particular pot odds incorrectly, or perhaps not even at all. This is particularly true in online poker where time limits are strict and players new to the game may not yet have the experience or perhaps the mathematical ability to quickly weigh up whether the bet they’re being asked to make represents good value or not.
Well for those players who have found themselves sitting at a table desperately trying to remember what the odds are of them hitting their flush or have started to drown in a sea of numbers half way through their calculations, don’t panic. There’s an easier way of going about things. It takes a fraction of the time and is as accurate as you will need it to be. It’s called the “The Rule of 42″ (or The Rule of 4-2).
The Rule of 42 will allow you to calculate the chance you have of hitting your outs once the flop has hit the table, and it as simple as this:
Hitting an out on the next card dealt:
Number of outs x 2 + 2 = likelihood of card hitting on the next card(%age)
Hitting an out in the next two cards
1-8 outs:
Number of outs x 4 = likelihood of card hitting in the next two cards(%age)
9-12 outs:
Number of outs x 4 - 1 = likelihood of card hitting in the next two cards(%age)
13-16 outs:
Number of outs x 4 - 4 = likelihood of card hitting in the next two cards(%age)
Any time you’re holding more than 14 outs, you’re an odds on favourite to make your hand so calling a pot of any size becomes worthwhile.
So let’s look at this in a gameplay situation.
You’re holding As 6s.
The flop comes:Jd 4s 10s
You’re one card away from hitting the nut flush which, in all likelihood, will be good enough to win you the pot. But what are the chances of you hitting the extra spade that you need to pull the chips down?
As you look at things, you need one of 9 remaining spades to be dealt (The thirteen in the pack minus the two in your hand and the two that were dealt on the flop). These are your outs.
The rule of 42 states that after the flop, you simply need to calculate the number of outs you have by four and then subtract one to determine your chances of landing the necessary spade by the end of the hand. So in this example, you have a 35% (or a little over 3-1) chance to make your flush if you were to stay in the hand until the river card is turned over: exactly the same figure you’d get if you were to go through the more complicated maths.
However, if you’re not looking as far as the river card and are only interested in the odds of your card appearing on the turn you simply need to multiply the number of outs by two before adding another 2 to get the necessary odds. In the above example, this calculation will show that there’s a 20% (or 5-1) chance of the card being dealt on the turn. That’s close enough to the 19.6% chance you’d end up with if you went through the full calculations.With these sums figured out, you can then look at the size of the bet you’re being asked to make and decide whether it represents good value or not.
In the example above, a solid player looking to call before the turn card would need to ensure that the amount of cash in the middle of the table outweighed the chances of him completing his hand.
If he was being asked to call $50 in order to win a $150 pot, he’s only getting odds of 3-1 for his money ($150 divided by $50). However, as we’ve seen the chances of his card arriving on the turn are 5-1 so this is not a sensible bet to make.
In order to make that call, the player would need to ensure that there was at least $250 (50 x 5) in the middle of the table for him to get his hands on before he threw his own chips into the ring.
The important thing to remember here is that The Rule of 42 only comes into play once the flop has been dealt. You can only use it to calculate the chances of you hitting your outs on the turn and/or the river.
Bare that in mind though and you should find your game improving drastically.