Poker Odds: Poker Hands Combinations Diagram
Wondering how to calculate the odds of getting a winning hand in poker, while you’re in play? It’s not the easiest thing to do, and most professionals either approximate or bluff, or both. Poker Lab Rat discusses the way that Poker pro Clonie Gowen calculates her odds while in play. It’s helpful if you are not an aspiring Professor of Game Theory like Chris Ferguson.
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.)
The diagram above will be used as a launching for later articles. It should help you visualize some of your hand odds, and is easier to remember than a bunch of formulas. Here’s how it works:
- (1) The lozenge shape represents all possible 5-card poker hands, and includes all the circles.
- (2) The reddish circle is a general representation of hands that include pairs, two pair, triples, and four of a kind.
- (3) The intersection between a pair and a triple represents a full house (i.e., the hand has both types).
- (4) The green circles represent the straight hands: straight, flush, straight flush, and royal flush.
Catching on yet? So if you’re in play, pre-flop, and you’re wondering how your hand may turn out, think of this diagram. When I can come up with a logical tie-in to some formulas that I haven’t already presented here, I’ll continue the series.
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