Week 3: Pot Odds, Equity, and the Calling Decision

Reopening week 1's rule of 4 and 2 — its exact error, outs-counting by draw type, and one real hand priced from equity through to a dollar EV

8 March 2027

Open the slides

This week’s lecture is the slide deck rather than this page — it’s the point in the syllabus where the material is genuinely a sequence of worked steps building on each other, and slides carry that better than prose. This page is the map of what’s in it and what to do around it.

What the deck resolves#

Week 1 named “use the rule of 4 and 2 to estimate your equity on a draw” as a claim to be cashed in later. The deck derives the exact hypergeometric equity the rule is approximating, measures the rule’s actual error at several out counts, and shows the error grows with the size of the draw rather than staying fixed.

What’s in the deck#

Nine steps, in order: the rule restated, its error quantified, outs counted across draw types (gutshot, open-ended, flush, combo), a common card-removal miscount and what it costs, the exact hypergeometric formula, the pot-odds threshold formula, implied and reverse-implied odds, one real hand walked end to end, and a closing dollar-EV comparison against what the week 1 folk rule would have priced the same hand at.

Before next week#

Bring a calculator, or be ready to do the arithmetic by hand — the week 3 Problem Session works through the flagship hand’s numbers from scratch, not from the deck’s already-computed answers.