Texas Holdem Poker

You don not have to be a genius to be able to do most of the math involved in playing no limit texas holdem poker. If you have basic skills, adding and percentages, it will be relatively easy for you to figure out. Learning these basic skills can make those sometimes extremely difficult decisions a little more easy. It will help you make better choices of when to chase a straight or flush, or maybe if the better option is to fold. The more you practice and think about the math involved in Texas Holdem the more natural it will come to you.

A few pointers on playing pre flop before you go putting all your money in the middle with pocket sixes. With pocket pairs you will hit your set (three of a kind) about twelve percent of the time. As an example if you are playing pocket deuces you will not hit that third two eighty eight percent of the time and you will have a lot of over cards to deal with. If you are holding an ace king pre flop you will hit at least one of those cards about thirty six percent of the time. With suited cards you will have a four card flush eleven percent of the time after the flop. So if you have an ace king of spades before the flop you will hit a pair thirty six percent of the time and have a flush draw eleven percent of the time, if your lucky maybe you will catch both.

First things first, to become a good poker player you need to learn how to put your opponents on a hand. This can take a lot of practice, but if you are paying attention when you play you will pick up patterns in your competitors. If you play a lot of online poker I suggest keeping notes on the players, who you pick these patterns up on, just in case you run into them at another game in the future. As an example if you have been playing against a guy for three hours and he’s only raise a handful of times and every time he does he seems to have aces, kings, queens or ace king that is a pattern. The same guy raise in early position in front of you, when you look down at your hand you see pocket jacks, what should you do? Well if you are confident he has one of the four hands stated earlier then you are probably beat and you should lay down, but he might have ace king. You could also just call and see if you could hit that jack, but if you see an ace or a king you can easily assume your beat. If you call you need to watch out for a pair bigger then yours, trust your read and go with it. The more you know about your competitor, the easier it will be to figure out there hole cards.

Pot Odds – Simply the pot odds are the amount of money in the pot against the amount of money you have to call to stay in the hand. For example there is a pot of $10, your opponent bets $1, you now have to call $1 into an $11 pot ($10 pot plus $1 bet), therefore you are getting 11-1 odds. To use these pot odds correctly you need to know what your real odds are. After you have made the read on your opponent, and calculated the pot odds you need to add up the amount of cards you have left in the deck to make you a winner. These are your outs. Everyone knows that there are 52 cards in a deck and 13 cards of each suit. You need to add up your outs that are left in the deck (cards you don’t see), and the amount of cards left that won’t help you. As an example if you have a flush draw in hearts after the flop, 13 hearts in the deck you see four of them leaving you with nine outs. You know what the three flop cards are and the two cards that you are holding leaving you with 47 cards that you have not seen. Nine of those 47 cards will give you a flush, 38 cards will not, giving you the of 38-9 (4.2 – 1) to make your flush.

Practical Use – Here’s an example for you : Your playing $1/$2 no limit holdem and you call the raise to $5 from an aggressive player pre flop with a King Queen of clubs to play heads up (you and one other player in the pot). The flop comes Jack of Clubs, Seven of Hearts and 10 of Clubs giving you a royal flush draw. Your opponent bets into you $5 bringing the pot up to $18 and its your turn to act, you read your opponent as weak (small pair as best). You think your King (3 outs), your Queen (3 outs), your straight draw (8 outs) and your flush draw (9 outs) are all good. This gives you 23 outs, and with 47 unseen cards, the odds of making your hand are 1-1. The pot odds are 18-5 (3.6-1), which means you are getting a great price to call or I suggest make a raise. If you raise and your opponent makes the call maybe you need to change your read, and adapt your outs and odds accordingly. Possibly your King and Queen aren’t good maybe your opponent spiked a set, minus the six outs and readjust.

As you see the math isn’t overly difficult and with practice it can become second nature to you. Knowing the math will force you to improve your game and will make your life easier. With this simple knowledge you will make better decisions, and learn how your opponents may be thinking. Make your reads, trust your gu