Playing poker online means that you can’t see your opponents face to face, so you have to rely more on playing solid poker than reading people. Without the reads to influence your play, you can rely on math to decide what the right play is in a lot of circumstances. Here we’re going to take a look at some of the basic aspects of poker math that can help you make better decisions when playing poker online.
No-limit hold’em is the most popular form of online poker, and in this game, you begin each hand with two pocket cards that no other player can see. When hand reading without being able to see your opponent’s face, thinking about what possible hands your opponents can have is the key to playing well. Perhaps surprisingly, math can help you with this a great deal because the chance of being dealt different starting hands changes based on which cards you have in your hand and which cards you have seen on the community board.
Before the flop, there are six ways to be dealt a pocket pair, but 16 ways to be dealt a non-pair pocket hand. So if your opponent’s range of possible hands before the flop was pocket Aces, pocket Kings, or Ace-King, then he could have a total of 6 + 6 + 16 = 28 starting hand combinations. So even though you might think that two-thirds of his starting hands are big pairs, in reality, he will have Ace-King a little over 57% of the time.
When a card comes that lowers the chance of your opponent having a certain hand, it’s called a blocker to that hand. For example, if you had Ace-Five suited before the flop, and you thought your opponent’s range of possible hands was pocket Aces, pocket Kings, and Ace-King, then the chance of him having pocket Aces or Ace-King decreases because you hold one of the Aces. Here, the Ace you hold is called a blocker. When you hold one blocker, the number of possible ways he can have pocket Aces decreases to three, and the number of possible ways he can have Ace-King decreases to 12. Since the number of ways he can have pocket Kings stays the same, it’s now more likely as a percentage that he has Kings than if you held a hand without an Ace blocker, like Six-Five suited.