Learn Poker Hand Odds

 

Poker Software and the Sklansky Group Hand Rankings. You may have noticed that while using your poker calculator that it displays your hand odds while also using terminology like “hand rank”, “group”, or “group rank” – all of which (in some way or another) refer to author David Sklanksy’s Group Hand Ranking for hold’em poker. Playing poker is about playing the odds. The following list gives the odds for outcomes in Texas Hold’em hands. When you realize how heavily the odds are stacked against you, you may want to rethink going all-in before the flop with two suited cards. Use the odds to your advantage: 1 percent (1-in-100): Percentage of. Divide by the amount you need to call. Pot odds are invariably a function of calling or folding, rather than betting. In the simplest terms, if the bet is $1 to you, and there is already $4 in the pot, your pot odds are 5:1.

Poker hand odds: Any poker player knows the odds of winning the game in most situations.

Poker is a game of percentages and probability and not a game of luck.

Whether you like it or not odds are the very basis of decisions you will make at the poker table.

If you aspire to be a poker player you definitely need to understand and instinctively know how to use poker hand odds to make the winning decisions.

A good poker player is really good at estimating poker hand odds. You might be using poker hand odds when you decide to draw raise a bet or call an opponent.

Probability will tell you how frequent an event will occur – odds will help you by letting you know how often an event will not occur.

Check this out: The Benefits Of A Poker Hand Calculator

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Calculating poker hand odds

The most misunderstood and misused concept by a beginner player is calculating pot odds.

Learning to calculate pot odds translates the concept of risk and reward to a numerical computation.

It is not very complicated for people with poor mathematical skills and a little bit of practice you will be able to calculate your pot odds successfully.

It is often confusing for any beginning players while calculating pot odds. The beginner often labors under the misleading concept that the money in the pot is his and can be used to compute the pot.

However, the fact of the matter is that it was his before it went into the pot and the only way he will get it back is by winning it.

This is the cardinal rule for not using the money in the pot for calculating the odds.

The second factor to be taken into account is “implied odds.” Implied odds consider the money in the pot, the bet amount and also the chances of extra bets that can be collected when you win your hand.

If you bet with someone “seven to one”, written as 7:1. It denotes that for every bet you win you will get seven times more of what you bet. So if you bet $5 and you win, you’ll be paid $35.

Greater the ratio between betting and winning, the more confident your competitor is that you will lose. So if someone offers you odds of 50:1 it means that they are totally sure that you are not going to win.

You are called as a long shot if the odds are large against you and everyone around is convinced that your chances of winning are absolutely nill.

Rely on experience & knowledge

Irrespective of what poker you are playing it is impossible you will find even one or more than one card to get a winning hand.

As luck would have it, the chances of you finding the cards you require are usually and always will be one in a million.

Learn Poker Hand Odds

In Draw Poker a pair of Aces and a pair of Eights would be quite good, and another Ace or Eight, the percentage of you winning would go up infinitely.

To get to that point you will need to get one of the four cards, from the remaining two Aces and two Eights the odds of which will be one out 47, so your chances of winning are 4/47.

Read more here: Poker Odds Calculator – Poker Stats Tracker – Hand Matchup …

Chart your every move

A novice player is easy to spot in the crowd or players; because they calculate just how much rewarding a bet is. Blindly betting or not calculating the odds is far worse than just having a rough idea of whether you will get a winning hand.

You need to include the pot odds in your calculations; and to win you must retain a hand instead of improving it. Community poker games pose a lot of problems with poker odds.

A community card can turn your bad hand into a winner.

Bet Speculating

Despite all the calculating poker hand odds some amount of calculative bets can also be incorporated into your game.

An occasional devil may care attitude can not only liven up the game.

An even hardcore professional poker player takes a risk; that at times might be outrageous; when logic says to fold.

But these are not just wild bets but in reality will be a calculated bet based on the pot.

Related: Poker Odds and Poker Hands Statistics

While playing online poker odds calculators are available; which give you the permutation and combinations; as well as the odds of you making the winning hand.

Genesis

It shows this in correlation to the cards in your hand; and the number of players in the game at that time.

The calculator gives you with amazing accuracy the probability of you winning; with the hand you have. The software makes the decision on whether to hold, fold, or bet much more easier to make. Even professional players utilize the software for calculating the poker odds; It helps them make decisions.

Last Word

Using this is as good as having an expert by your side and helping you to make the right decisions, and it will teach you how to recognize the odds of winning at any hand.

As you become experienced, this will improve your overall playing ability. The something to remember is that a poker odds calculator is not a ‘poker bot‘ and will not play on your behalf. It is you who still have make the plays.

Here what you get is just a little extra help. It is a game of luck, psychology, and skill with a little bit of maths involved. You have to make use of bluffing, and look out for signs of weakness in the fellow players; and attempt to mislead your opponents on occasions, coupled with changes in your style.

Following poker hand odds calculator every time will rob you of the chance to change your game; risk missing important tells, and in short , ou will miss out on paying attention to the players.

This post works with 5-card Poker hands drawn from a standard deck of 52 cards. The discussion is mostly mathematical, using the Poker hands to illustrate counting techniques and calculation of probabilities

Working with poker hands is an excellent way to illustrate the counting techniques covered previously in this blog – multiplication principle, permutation and combination (also covered here). There are 2,598,960 many possible 5-card Poker hands. Thus the probability of obtaining any one specific hand is 1 in 2,598,960 (roughly 1 in 2.6 million). The probability of obtaining a given type of hands (e.g. three of a kind) is the number of possible hands for that type over 2,598,960. Thus this is primarily a counting exercise.

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Preliminary Calculation

Usually the order in which the cards are dealt is not important (except in the case of stud poker). Thus the following three examples point to the same poker hand. The only difference is the order in which the cards are dealt.

These are the same hand. Order is not important.

The number of possible 5-card poker hands would then be the same as the number of 5-element subsets of 52 objects. The following is the total number of 5-card poker hands drawn from a standard deck of 52 cards.

The notation is called the binomial coefficient and is pronounced “n choose r”, which is identical to the number of -element subsets of a set with objects. Other notations for are , and . Many calculators have a function for . Of course the calculation can also be done by definition by first calculating factorials.

Thus the probability of obtaining a specific hand (say, 2, 6, 10, K, A, all diamond) would be 1 in 2,598,960. If 5 cards are randomly drawn, what is the probability of getting a 5-card hand consisting of all diamond cards? It is

This is definitely a very rare event (less than 0.05% chance of happening). The numerator 1,287 is the number of hands consisting of all diamond cards, which is obtained by the following calculation.

The reasoning for the above calculation is that to draw a 5-card hand consisting of all diamond, we are drawing 5 cards from the 13 diamond cards and drawing zero cards from the other 39 cards. Since (there is only one way to draw nothing), is the number of hands with all diamonds.

If 5 cards are randomly drawn, what is the probability of getting a 5-card hand consisting of cards in one suit? The probability of getting all 5 cards in another suit (say heart) would also be 1287/2598960. So we have the following derivation.

Thus getting a hand with all cards in one suit is 4 times more likely than getting one with all diamond, but is still a rare event (with about a 0.2% chance of happening). Some of the higher ranked poker hands are in one suit but with additional strict requirements. They will be further discussed below.

Another example. What is the probability of obtaining a hand that has 3 diamonds and 2 hearts? The answer is 22308/2598960 = 0.008583433. The number of “3 diamond, 2 heart” hands is calculated as follows:

One theme that emerges is that the multiplication principle is behind the numerator of a poker hand probability. For example, we can think of the process to get a 5-card hand with 3 diamonds and 2 hearts in three steps. The first is to draw 3 cards from the 13 diamond cards, the second is to draw 2 cards from the 13 heart cards, and the third is to draw zero from the remaining 26 cards. The third step can be omitted since the number of ways of choosing zero is 1. In any case, the number of possible ways to carry out that 2-step (or 3-step) process is to multiply all the possibilities together.

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The Poker Hands

Here’s a ranking chart of the Poker hands.

The chart lists the rankings with an example for each ranking. The examples are a good reminder of the definitions. The highest ranking of them all is the royal flush, which consists of 5 consecutive cards in one suit with the highest card being Ace. There is only one such hand in each suit. Thus the chance for getting a royal flush is 4 in 2,598,960.

Royal flush is a specific example of a straight flush, which consists of 5 consecutive cards in one suit. There are 10 such hands in one suit. So there are 40 hands for straight flush in total. A flush is a hand with 5 cards in the same suit but not in consecutive order (or not in sequence). Thus the requirement for flush is considerably more relaxed than a straight flush. A straight is like a straight flush in that the 5 cards are in sequence but the 5 cards in a straight are not of the same suit. For a more in depth discussion on Poker hands, see the Wikipedia entry on Poker hands.

The counting for some of these hands is done in the next section. The definition of the hands can be inferred from the above chart. For the sake of completeness, the following table lists out the definition.


Definitions of Poker Hands

Poker HandDefinition
1Royal FlushA, K, Q, J, 10, all in the same suit
2Straight FlushFive consecutive cards,
all in the same suit
3Four of a KindFour cards of the same rank,
one card of another rank
4Full HouseThree of a kind with a pair
5FlushFive cards of the same suit,
not in consecutive order
6StraightFive consecutive cards,
not of the same suit
7Three of a KindThree cards of the same rank,
2 cards of two other ranks
8Two PairTwo cards of the same rank,
two cards of another rank,
one card of a third rank
9One PairThree cards of the same rank,
3 cards of three other ranks
10High CardIf no one has any of the above hands,
the player with the highest card wins

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Counting Poker Hands

Straight Flush
Counting from A-K-Q-J-10, K-Q-J-10-9, Q-J-10-9-8, …, 6-5-4-3-2 to 5-4-3-2-A, there are 10 hands that are in sequence in a given suit. So there are 40 straight flush hands all together.

Four of a Kind
There is only one way to have a four of a kind for a given rank. The fifth card can be any one of the remaining 48 cards. Thus there are 48 possibilities of a four of a kind in one rank. Thus there are 13 x 48 = 624 many four of a kind in total.

Full House
Let’s fix two ranks, say 2 and 8. How many ways can we have three of 2 and two of 8? We are choosing 3 cards out of the four 2’s and choosing 2 cards out of the four 8’s. That would be = 4 x 6 = 24. But the two ranks can be other ranks too. How many ways can we pick two ranks out of 13? That would be 13 x 12 = 156. So the total number of possibilities for Full House is

Note that the multiplication principle is at work here. When we pick two ranks, the number of ways is 13 x 12 = 156. Why did we not use = 78?

Flush
There are = 1,287 possible hands with all cards in the same suit. Recall that there are only 10 straight flush on a given suit. Thus of all the 5-card hands with all cards in a given suit, there are 1,287-10 = 1,277 hands that are not straight flush. Thus the total number of flush hands is 4 x 1277 = 5,108.

Learn Poker Hand Odds Genesis Open

Straight
There are 10 five-consecutive sequences in 13 cards (as shown in the explanation for straight flush in this section). In each such sequence, there are 4 choices for each card (one for each suit). Thus the number of 5-card hands with 5 cards in sequence is . Then we need to subtract the number of straight flushes (40) from this number. Thus the number of straight is 10240 – 10 = 10,200.

Three of a Kind
There are 13 ranks (from A, K, …, to 2). We choose one of them to have 3 cards in that rank and two other ranks to have one card in each of those ranks. The following derivation reflects all the choosing in this process.

Two Pair and One Pair
These two are left as exercises.

High Card
The count is the complement that makes up 2,598,960.

Learn Poker Hand Odds Against

The following table gives the counts of all the poker hands. The probability is the fraction of the 2,598,960 hands that meet the requirement of the type of hands in question. Note that royal flush is not listed. This is because it is included in the count for straight flush. Royal flush is omitted so that he counts add up to 2,598,960.


Probabilities of Poker Hands

Poker HandCountProbability
2Straight Flush400.0000154
3Four of a Kind6240.0002401
4Full House3,7440.0014406
5Flush5,1080.0019654
6Straight10,2000.0039246
7Three of a Kind54,9120.0211285
8Two Pair123,5520.0475390
9One Pair1,098,2400.4225690
10High Card1,302,5400.5011774
Total2,598,9601.0000000

Learn Poker Hand Odds Nfl Week 11

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2017 – Dan Ma