What chance does your hand have?

Odds and outs

Your knowledge and prowess at playing poker, combined with your experience and acumen determine the chances of winning or losing the game. The only way to be sure that you come up trumps every single time is by reducing your reliability on chance to win a game and that can only be achieved if you gain more knowledge about the game and become more skillful at it.

Each time a hand is dealt to a player, there are 1326 courses he can adopt to make the next move. Go figure! And if the player chooses not to fold, he/she will end up seeing one of a possible combination of 19600 different probable flops. Post the flop, there are exactly 1081 possible two-card combinations on the turn and river. And by the end of the game, when showdown comes, the winning hand will be one of the 2598960 possible five card hands.

Your chances of winning? As thin as they are fat!

If you have ever wondered why you have never hit a Royal Flush, here is why? Of the 2598960 possible hands you could get in a game of poker, only four are Royal Flushes (spades, clubs, hearts and diamonds). Do the math! This also means that to realistically expect to hit a royal you would have to play for eight hours a day, seven days a week for seven years. If you get one, relish the moment! Ha ha!

Some useful odds to keep in mind are as follows:

A player with four cards of the same suit after the flop is 1.85:1 to make a flush by the river.
A player with an open ended straight draw is 2.2:1 to make at least a straight by the river.
A player holding an open-ended straight flush draw after the flop is .67:1 to make at least a straight by the river. That is, the player is more likely to improve the hand than not improve it.
A player drawing to an inside straight is around 11:1 to make it on the next card.

Calculating outs

Cards left in the deck that can make your hand are called outs. So, the total number of cards left unseen that could make your hand are your total number of outs.

Let us say you’re holding a drawing hand after the flop. You already know one important thing, you are behind anyone who has hit a pair. Calculate your outs and you will know another, even more important, thing which is that your chances of beating that pair. Do this by dividing the number of outs that have not been seen with the number of cards that have not been seen – those are your chances of filling in your hand.