Choose your language

Recommended

Odds: How Strong is Your Hands?

See also

You are dealt A-J spades on the big blind. Someone raises, and you call. The flop comes Qh-10d-9s. What do you do? In an ideal world, the turn card would be a King, giving you the nut-straight. However, an 8 also gives you a straight. How do you figure out the strength of your hand?

The answer is by determining the odds of hitting your ideal cards, the cards that make you win. There are four Kings and four Eights in the deck, so you have eight outs. Outs are cards that give you the winning hand, probably. Remember that you do not know for sure what cards your opponents hold.

Is eight outs good? There are 52 cards in the deck, and you have seen five of them: your two hole cards A-J, and the flop Q-10-9. 52 cards take away 5 leaves 47 cards unseen. 8 cards out of those 47 give you a probable winner; therefore your odds of winning are 8/47 or roughly 1 in 6. At this point, you have to take into consideration the number of opponents who are still in the hand and the size of the pot.

Stealing in No-Limit Holdem

See also

Stealing well is critical to no-limit success. Yet most small stakes regulars focus mainly on making hands and give stealing relatively little thought. This undue emphasis on making hands condemns most small stakes regulars to only marginal success. They win lots of money in pots that go to showdown, but they lose nearly as much in pots that don't go to showdown, and their overall winrates hover near zero. If you suffer from this problem, we're going to fix it.

Stealing and making the best hand can overlap considerably. For example, say you have 9 8 and completely miss a flop of A J 4. You should immediately think. "Can I steal?" However, if your lone opponent has 7 6 you actually have the best hand.

Poker: Points of Honesty

See also

Every poker player has spots in his game where he tends to become honest. This honesty is often a result of the reactions of the other players at the table but it can also be a result of his natural style.
A point of honesty is a situation where a player will only continue to put money into the pot with a strong hand.

Preflop most players tend to become honest when they are 4-bet. In other words they are not 5-bet bluffing or defending light often enough that we need to be taking it into account. The situation we create when we 4-bet is an example of a point of honesty for the villain.
The better our perceived strength is in a given situation the more likely it is that the same situation is a point of honesty for our opponent

Check-Raise in Pot Limit Omaha

See also Omaha Rules

In Pot Limit Omaha, when you check-raise, the majority of the time, you either have the nuts or air. Although the range you are representing are representing is polarized, your opponents will fold a decent amount because for the times you have the nuts, they might not have many outs.

A simple example is on a flop of 765, when you check-raise, you are representing 89xx. If you have a solid image, it is pretty tough for him to call with a made hand that is worse than two pairs with no redraw. Once your flop check-raise gets called, it is probably a good idea to give up since your opponent's range is fairly strong if he can call a check-raise on a 765 board.