The Odds-On Favourite - Calculating Your Chances At Texas Holdem
Whether you plan to be a serious professional Texas Hold’em poker player online or in person, or just want to get together with friends for a weekly house game, you’ll gain an incredible advantage over your opponents if you learn a few primary skills:
- (1) Learn how to calculate your approximate odds of winning, before and after the flop. You don’t have to calculate down to the exact percentage. Start with understanding why the top ten hands before the flop are called that. Then understand how your odds change by both the number of opponents and the cards that come up on the flop, turn and river.
- (2) Learn how to calculate the chances that another player has a particular set of two cards before the flop. This is affected by the number of people in the game. The more players there are, the less likely that any single player has a particular set of cards. Understanding this gives you an edge, especially if you’re sure that your opponents don’t understand this. Never assume: read your opponents.
- (3) Learn how to read your opponents.
- (a) What’s the likelihood that they really know how to calculate the odds on their own cards? For home games, you probably know whether or not your opponents have any math skills.
- (b) What’s the likelihood that they will actually play based on their odds, or discard the info and play somewhere between conservatively and aggressively.
- (4) Learn how to use all of this information to play your hands out or fold gracefully.
Mastering these skills are the core of being a good poker player, but especially important for Texas Hold’em. Over a loose series of articles, I’ll cover the Top 10 hands, and how to calculate your odds at winning when you start with each hand before the flop.
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The Poker Blog » Poker Odds: Poker Hands Combinations Diagram
April 19th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
[…] Fortunately for me, my father, like Chris’ father and mother, was a Mathematics Professor. I used to read his Game Theory books when I was a young nerd of somewhere between 12-13. But it took me a while fiddling with cards before I started to understand card game theory. Since my earlier series of poker hand odds seemed to draw a lot of readers, compared to other posts, I thought I’d explore game theory a bit more. (Text continued below the diagram.) […]