Today’s free poker online lesson is going to focus on some basic poker math, from basic tips and tricks to applying math at the table to help you make profitable decisions. I don’t really want to waste more time on the intro, so on to the poker!

It’s a fact, sad for some us but poker has a big math basis

The reality is that poker is a game of frequencies, percentages and number formulas such as implied odds. Yes of course there is some chance (or blind luck) in poker. The best player in the world can lose for 10,000 hands, and even the worst players are sure to win big pots at times.

But making profitable decisions all boils down to the math. Odds of hitting your cards, weighting your opponents’ ranges towards certain hands, and understanding how to exploit your opponents based on their tendencies (which can be broken down into percentages).

Happily, for most people, poker math is not so hard once learned and there are some tricks you can use to help you get it down.

2 Core Concepts

The two most basic math concepts in poker are calculating your outs (and consequently your percentage chance of hitting one of them), and calculating pot odds.

In this article I am covering calculating outs. I will do pot odds in the next article.

For those who don’t know, an “out” is a card that you feel will improve your hand to the best hand.

> For example, at the flop, you know your opponent has top pair, you have 4 clubs – in hand and 2 on the table.

>There are thirteen cards of each suit in the deck, and you know that if you hit a pair your opponent will still have a better hand than you.

> There are 9 (13-4) clubs left in the deck. For the moment consider it irrelevant that the opponent might have a club, from the 47 unknown cards left (you know five, your two pocket cards and the three on the flop), nine are clubs.

> You also know that since your opponent has top pair, if you hit a club you’ll improve to the best hand, so the 9 clubs are your outs.

Here’s a simple rule of thumb which is very very important.

> On each postflop street, any given card has about a 2% chance of coming (1/47 on the turn, 1/46 on the river).

> Therefore, you have approximately an 18% chance to hit on the turn, and another 18% chance to hit on the river.

Should you be forced all in then you have a 36% chance on the 2 streets to hit your outs but if you’re not all in then a bet on the Turn could force you to fold pre River.

In the interest of simplicity, we’ll assume the odds of striking runner-runner 2 pair, a runner-runner straight, etc is negligible (you really possibly have 9.25 or 9.5 outs rather than just 9).

If you have grasped all things up to this point, well done, you’re on your way in poker math.. In the next free online poker lesson we’ll look at pot odds.

Or if you want to learn about that now and also check out more advanced stuff like Implied Odds get over to the NoPayPOKER.com free online poker games training blog where all is revealed.

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