My favourite poker strategy tip....

Don't forget your parents sisters, wait a minute, that's not right.

Antes, that's it don't forget the antes. You know the bit they take off all of you in most MTT's to start to build a pot, well they should be included in your calcs for pot odds.

I regularly see people snap fold a min raise in the BB and wonder how bad their hand must have been. I mean the raise was 1BB the pot is a minimum now of your 1BB their 2BB and the 0.7BB of antes (assuming a) they are the SB otherwise add another 0.5 into the tally b) nobody else has already called for 1BB and is behind).

So even in this minimalist scenario of you and the SB it is going to cost you 1BB to potentially get 3.7BB that is otherwise dead and gone. That's more than 3 to 1 and nearly 4 to 1. So long term for the call to be profitable you have to win the hand more than ~27% of the time. Now to give you some idea of what that means cards wise we all know AA is roughly 85% vs any two random unconnected cards, but you have to assume the would shove AA unless late in game and trapping. But what if you had connected cards against say a suited big slick? Honestly they don't have to be that great....

2 gapper vs tier 3 pair?

So hopefully you take two things away from this today, one the antes are important and can determine whether or not to call. Two, it will only benefit your poker game knowing the rough equity of the cards you hold and how to calculate the equity required for a play to be long term profitable (statistically speaking of course, I am aware of my EV chart 🥰).