Weighing up the pre-flop odds: part 1
Weighing up the pre-flop odds: part 2
Weighing up the pre-flop odds: part 3
Weighing up the pre-flop odds: part 4
Implied odds - Stu calls it right
Apart from man-breasts and halitosis, what does your opponent have? It is the great unponderable of poker, but it pays to ponder anyway.
To hear many poker players tell it, reading an opponent’s hole cards is part science, part voodoo, but unless you want to commune with our poultry-bothering chums it is best to focus on the science part. In this case the accumulation and evaluation of evidence at the poker table in order to construct a thesis that you can at least live with.
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Unless you see your opponents cards you’ll never know for sure what they had when you made your best guess, and that can be a big psychological hurdle for ‘thinking’ players. It’s the not knowing they can’t stand, and, in novices at least, this too often manifests itself as a nuts-or-nothing tightness that strangles profitability.
F Scott Fitzgerald got close to the nub of the matter: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Poker players need to hold more than two opposing ideas in mind when reading an opponent.
It is conceivable that a couple of dozen mutually exclusive hands could be on your ‘possibles’ list for an opponent, and for it still to be profitable to proceed on that basis - though in truth, you would have to be some sort of savant to function despite such uncertainty, and novice ‘readers’ need to start at the Janet and John end of the spectrum: is it a ball or is it a dog?
To that end, first stage poker literacy is not about the cards you can’t see, but about the cards you can - your hole cards and the board. It is astonishing how high a percentage of low-stakes players seem unable or unwilling to read the game at even this most basic level. They are outraged to find their two-pair beaten by trips, or a flush that they hadn’t even considered being possible.
If your aim is to be the Sherlock Holmes among these blundering flat-foots, your first bit of sleuthing involves nothing more than observing the known cards in play - your hole cards and the flop - and asking yourself a series of fundamental questions. What is the best poker hand that I can make now? How many cards, if any, on the turn will change my best hand, and in what ways? What about the turn AND the river? Do I have a classic ‘drawing hand’, to a straight or flush, and if so, how many ‘outs’ do I have?
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Then you remove your hole cards from the picture and ask the same questions. What is the best poker hand that could be made now if an opponent could choose their hole cards? How many cards, if any, on the turn might change ‘the best possible poker hand’? What about the turn AND the river? And is a classic drawing hand possible? If so, how many outs will make it?
‘The nuts’ - or the best theoretical hand that could be made, given the communal cards in play - is rarely held, or even required to win a poker pot, but it is the starting point for all reads; the benchmark against which you measure all other possibilities.
It’s good to have an indisputable, if theoretical, ‘fact’ to hand, when you are wrestling with the great unknown, more of which next week.
Alex Hankin is the author of The Definitive Guide To Poker published by Raceform Ltd at £16.99. Available from BooksFirst for £15.29 (www.booksfirst.co.uk/product.asp?ProdID=717893), with free postage and packaging.