lesson two: some very basic odds

For anyone reading this who's relatively new at poker, or doesn't have a good idea about the math of it at all, here's how often you'd get some example hands if you were dealt 5 cards from a standard deck:



Pair - four times out of every nine hands
Two Pair - once every 21 times
Trips - once every 47 times
A Straight - once every 255 times
A Flush - once every 509 times
A Full House - once every 694 times
Quads - once every 4164 times
A Straight Flush - once every 64974 times
A Royal Flush - once every 649740 times


So what does this tell you? Well, a few things. If hold'em is primarily your game, you'll have to adjust these a bit, since you're potentially seeing seven rather than five cards. However, they give you a feel for how relatively often the different hands occur. Also, as you might have noticed from the "pair" statistic, Most five card poker hands are weaker than one pair. This is extremely important, as it illustrates that not only is it difficult to obtain a hand that beats a full house, it's hard to have a good hand generally.



In hold'em, as well as in other poker games, an indispensible odds concept is the concept of outs. Without a solid understanding of how many outs you have, it is very difficult to succeed as a player.



Say you're in the following hand:



YOU:







YOUR OPPONENT:








and here's the board:


Your opponent is first to act, and the pot is $100. He/She bets. Should you call? Well, it depends. Of course, king high probably isn't the best hand here if there's been any sort of action during the hand. In fact, if you had to guess, you'd say you're probably up against something like AQ (top pair, top kicker), though it could be as weak as a pair of jacks or as strong as two pair. However, a lot of cards could come that would make you a definite winner. Those cards are called outs. In this case, our outs are the remaining clubs in the deck, which would make us the best possible flush, and the tens, which make us the ace-high straight. That's the four tens, plus eight more clubs (13 in the deck minus the K and Q in our hand, the A and 2 on board, and the ten which we already counted as an out.). That gives us twelve outs. With 46 unaccounted for cards, our chances of about 26 or 26½ percent to win on the river. So, whether or not we call is based on whether we're putting in more or less than 26 percent of the pot to call. Therefore, if we were facing a bet of $20, we'd likely call, but $35 or more would perhaps be a fold. After figuring all this out, we adjust slightly if there's a likelihood of getting paid off when we hit, or contrarily having to call future bets to draw.

This seems like a lot to remember, but it's easy to count outs, and it's okay to round all of the math and use more manageable numbers. if you have 9 outs (a flush draw) and one card coming, , 9 out of 46 cards are good. well, 45/9 = 5. In other words, you'll only make your flush once every five times. That's 20 percent, or in other words 4 to 1.