Poker Tactics - Cards are King

The fundamental rule about Poker is this:  it is governed by permutations and combinations of cards, and the better hands are governed by just how likely they are to occur.  The highest hands, straight flush and four of a kind, are so rare that when they occur you will note them.  They are rare because the mathematical odds of getting them in 7 cards ( Texas Hold'em two in the hand and 5 on the board ) are so rare.

This image to the left is the supremacy list of poker hands from the straight flush - all the same suit and in order - all the way down to the lowly One of a Kind where an Ace rules the world of bad hands.

The odds of a pair is 1098240 out of 2598960 or a little less than 50% of the time a pair will win the day.  Aces are highest so Aces is a hand that most people play. The three luckiest hands are, AA, AK, and KK.  So most people feel confident to play these hands. AK has a special place because if either a A or a K comes up then you have the high pair on the board.  For those people who play the least risky, and therefore the most predictable, these are the main stable of play. For some of these players these are the only hands they will play.

When you play against people you don't know, and you are unsure of the tactics of when to bet and when not to, the most important factors to remember are the odds of a hand and the supremacy of the hands.

Bluffing won't turn away good cards.  Position won't make a good player with a good hand worry.  Good players wait for an hour to play good cards so they would be damned by the poker gods to let you take the pot if you try these tactics.  The art of position and bluffing are important.  But in the end, cards are kings.


Whenever you bet you must look at your odds of winning in the light of these two factors:  can my hand beat most of the other possibilities with the cards on the table, and if not then can I get the cards I need to beat the others?

The deck of 52 cards is well known.  The fact is that more players means more chances of seeing all those higher winning card hands.  You need to be careful as you bet on a pair of aces that someone may have sneaked in two pairs of lowly sevens and nines.  In the end two low pairs beat a pair no matter what the ranking.

Daniel Negreanu describes three levels of players.  Level 1 players can figure out how good their own hand is.  Level 2 can figure out what can beat what they have.  And level 3 can figure out what the other player has. Before you can play well, you need to start with the basics and learn the order of cards and then learn to realize quickly how good your hand is and how to

Here is the fact about poker hands, you don't know how good yours is until you see the complete 7 cards.  Until then, you are playing based on speculation, and betting and bluffing on how good you think your cards are. This game, the speculating and considering others cards, is done to cause tension on the players and make the excitement and disappointment real. Sometimes the long odds wins and sometimes the predicted hand winds.  In the end, the odds favor the better cards.  But what are better cards really depends on what people play.

In order to determine what are good cards, you need to consider just how you can win and lose.

There are five possible winning hands:  high card, pairs (or sets), straights, flushes and straight flushes. Consider one of a kind as a special form of set and are ruled by the ace. Straight flushes are so rare that you can just consider them a form of straight. You may see a few in your lifetime, and probably not at time to win a monster pot.  If you look at the compressed versions of the winning hands, that leaves really three ways to play for the best hand.  Play to win with a straight,  play to win with a flush, and play to win with a set.

The conservative form of play involves the sets, the harder form of play involves straights and flushes.  Full house beats the straights and flushes so that is the best form of sets except four of a kind. When a full house is on the board, flush players and straight players beware.

Flushes and straights of five cards require some patience on the part of the player.  A pair or two pairs only require four cards at most and therefore you don't need a complete five good cards. When you play a straight or flush however, you will need to wait for the turn or river to get that straight or flush sometimes.  The best way to achieve these is playing suited connectors - cards in sequence and the same suit. The best way to play is to limp in betting and see if the cards come up on the flop.  These cards make it even rarer to do well, so you may need to play more types of hands than this to survive.

  Of course, since straights and flushes are rare combinations, this strategy is bound to cost you chips in the short term and make playing a lot harder to do.  But the reality is that when you play against conservative players holding those good cards, aces and kings, you can defeat them easily and perhaps catch them trying to take too many chips in the process because when you play few hands you need to make a large amount of chips to make up for the lack of play.