If you have read the pot odds for dummies article properly you're now able to deal with pot odds. But they are useless if you don't know your chances of winning, the so-called odds.
General probabilities
Everybody knows statements like: „with a likelihood of 80 %...“, or „I win 80 % of the time with my aces against your garbage hand“. Especially in poker this probabilities are very important. A player who moves all-in on the flop with a top pair and gets called by a flush draw has a 66 % chance of winning. The other 34 % of the time the player with the flush draw wins.
Percentages are one possibility to express probabilities. But at the poker table, there's a better way. 50 % means 1:1. The sum of 1 and 1 is 2. If you play this 50 % situation 2 times, then theoretically case 1 occurs 1 time and case 2 occurs also 1 time.
Supposing, you flip a coin. There are two possible outcomes: heads or tails. Both are equally likely, thus there's a 50 % chance of case 1 and a 50 % chance of case 2. It's -as you know- 50:50, or short 1:1. This 1:1 means that if you flip the coin 10 000 times, both cases theoretically occur equally often (5 000 and 5 000).
Player A has flopped a set (= three of a kind) and player B calls his all-in with an open-ended straight draw. Player A has a chance of 75 % and B has a chance of 25 %. Expressed in odds it's 75:25 or short 3:1.
The odds of 3:1 tell us that A wins three times and B one time out of four times. This is the whole mystery about odds.
Player A has a pair of aces and B a pair of eights. They moved all-in before the flop. The aces are an 80 % favourite against 88, or expressed in odds 4:1 (= 80/20). If the dealer would show five boards respectively, the aces would win four times and lose one time (as hard as it is...).
If you're new to pre-flop chances, e.g. when AK performs against 77 or A2 against KJ, please read this article.
From % to odds
As already mentioned, when playing poker, the expression “in odds” has to be preferred. However, some of the chances are expressed in percentages because there's a simple formula („2 and 4 rule“) to calculate them. But in order to handle decisions at the poker table you need to know the odds, not the percentages.
It's pretty easy. You just have to divide the larger number by the smaller number:
50 % chance means 50 % / 50 % = 1:1
75 % chance: 75 % / 25 % = 3:1
10 % chance: 90 % / 10 % = 9:1
66 % chance: 66 % / 33 % = 2:1
It's as simple as that and we have our odds.
If there are more than two players involved you calculate the odds like this:
Player A: 50 %, player B: 25 %, player C: 25 %, thus the odds are 1:1 (50/ (25 + 25))
That means that player A wins every second time.
Player B's odds are (50 + 25) / 25 = 3:1, he only wins every fourth time.
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Probabilities for Dummies