Free Poker Strategy

Understanding basic odds is something which will really help your poker play develop. With a deck of playing cards, there will always be odds for each occurence when turning over cards, but you do not need to know the exact odds of every single occurence to be successful.

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For poker beginners, I would say that there are a few common scenarios which will arise, and you can memorise the odds for these situations to help get you started. One of the most regularly seen circumstances in poker, is a pocket pair against two overcards. Much can be decided on such hands. (A,K) against (Q,Q) for instance, is around 48% to 52%. That is why these instances are known as coin flips. If you understand the odds of a commonly found situation such as this, it will help you make preflop decisions. You know if there is heavy preflop reraising and you are holding a hand like (10,10), you are probably around 50% at best.

Other common circumstances include flopped Flush and Straight draws. If you are holding (10,J) for instance, and the flop falls (2,8,9), you need a (7) or (Q) to complete your Straight. Four Queens plus four Sevens unaccounted for, makes eight cards to potentially make your hand.  There are 47 unexposed cards out there, and 8 goes into 47 somewhere close to 6 times. This means your chances of making the Straight on the next card are around 1 in 6, or 17%.

As I mentioned earlier, you do not have to be exact to the decimal place, just within one or two percent. With the Flush draw, you have 13 cards to a suit in the deck, so that leaves 9 cards of that suit out there somewhere. You have a 9 in 47 chance on the flop, which equates to about 19% on the next card alone. Remeber you chances of making the hand improve if you are going to the river card too, but if your poker opponent reads the situation well, they won’t let you get that far.