For example, given the above situation with hearts, you are holding 2 hearts into your pocket and another 2 hearts are in the table when the dealer shows the flop. Now there are 47 remaining cards in the deck and 4 hearts are shown, meaning only 9 more remaining in the deck. This makes 9 outs of 47 (roughly a 20%) to hit a flush on the turn and another 20% to hit it on the river. With this basic concept you must only call to draw cards if you expect to get 5x your bet. For example the pot at the flop is $10 and your opponent bets $5 and you are drawing for flush. It won’t be a wise idea if you are playing against another player only to call that bet. You are risking $5 to get $15 and your opponent may fold. Let him run with the money.

On the other hand, if you are in the same above situation but the pot is $30 you must call for sure because if the heart hits the turn you will win $55 by risking $5, this makes the more than the 20% you need and there is a chance of him calling your bet at the turn. By understanding these principles you can reverse them.

For example you were holding KK and called a reraised preflop of 10$ with 2 more players, making a total pot of $30, and the flop comes with K, 8, 4, and there are 2 spades on them. The outs of being outdrawn are 9 spades and 3 aces, this means 12 outs of 47. If you want to use the reverse pot odds in your favor you must bet at least $20 so it won’t be profitable for the other players to chase you. If you slowplay in this situation you are highly risking to be outdrawn.

This is only a rough guide on how to use the pot odds into your favor, there are much more complicated strategies and ways to apply them, but they need experience and you will learn them through the time, it is advisable to know the odds of the most used combinations so you don’t have to calculate them, like the odds to draw for flush, for straight etc… this will save time, and you must bear in mind that playing online poker is something you got to do fast because to make it profitable you got to play in several tables at the same time.