What can I do to calculate my odds in a hand?

Question

How do I calculate the odds of making my hand for any given game of poker?

Answer 1

The simple case, for making your hand on the next turn, is to add up the number of cards that can give you the winning hand on the next turn, and divide by the total number of unseen cards left in the deck. This means that, in games like Stud, you need to remove any potential outs that have been folded by others from the cards that can give you a winning hand.

In general, if you have seen 5 cards, and you have 4 to a flush, there are 47 unseen cards, and 9 that will give you a flush. If you think a flush is the winning hand, you have a 19.14% chance. If you are playing a flop game and you are up against a set, you have to discount the one flush card that would pair the board, which means you have 8 outs out of 47, or 17%.

So, for the "next card" solution, you have:

percent = (#outs) / (#unseen cards)

When there are multiple cards left, more advanced statistics become involved. You have to consider cards that may give your opponents the best hand, as well as conditional probabilities. In flop games with only the turn and river to go, and shared board cards, an approximation of the formula would be:

percent = ((#flopouts)/47) + 
           (1-(#flopouts)/47)*((#turnouts)/46) * 
              (1 - ((#opponentflopouts)/47) + 
                    (1-(#opponentflopouts)/47)*((#opponentturnouts)/46))

In that case, opponent outs are outs that will give your opponent a better hand than you. Depending on the hand you are drawing to, and your opponent's hand, the formula can be simpler - in the case of a flush draw against a set, you have 8 outs twice, but your opponent will have 6 cards on the turn that give him a full house, and 9 cards on the river that will do the same.

Answer 2

Here is a nice tool called pokertablestats.com and propokertools.com to help you calculate your chances!

A good rule of thumb I always use for calculating odds is multiply number of outs(13 with 4 on the flop and 2 on the turn. This way it will be much easier to remember and you are never that far away from the correct percentage.

If you do not understand the term "outs". This is basically just the number of cards you need to hit your hand. If you are holding for instance 2 spades in your hole and there are 2 more spades on the flop, you are holding a so called flush draw. There are 4 spades showing now and with a total of 13 spades in the deck, this leaves 9 more spades possible to hit on the turn or river. 9 outs for hitting your flush.

If you wanna use my easy to remember rule of thumb this makes it:

On the flop = number of flush outs x 4 = (13-4)x 4 = 36%

On the turn = number of flush outs x 2 = (13-4)x 2 = 18%

These numbers are somewhat higher than the absolute correct percentage though. Just remember to subtract a couple of percentages after calculating and you are never far away from the correct one :)

By the way,

Answer 3

Suppose you're at the flop with a pair and you want to know your chances of improving to a set by the end of the hand.

You've seen five cards from the deck (the two in your hand and the three on the flop); this means there are 47 cards in the deck that you haven't seen, and two of them will help you. Thus, the turn has a 2/47 chance of improving you to a set. If you don't improve on the turn then you still have two outs, but there are only 46 cards left in the deck, so you have a 2/46 (or 1/23) chance of improving on the river.

The odds of making your hand are equal to one (100%) minus the odds of not making your hand; in this case, that would be a 45/47 chance of not improving on the turn and a 44/46 chance of not improving on the river; this is a combined (45/47)*(44/46)=~91.58% chance of not improving on the turn or the river, which means you have approximately an 8.4% chance of hitting your set.

(Of course, this doesn't always mean an 8.4% chance of improving; you could unexpectedly backdoor a flush or straight)

Answer 4

The brute force method is to take all of the cards in the deck, deal out every possible combination of cards for a single player in the full course of the game and mark the total amount of times each possible hand occurs. Once you have the full stats, you can work out percentages for each hand by adding all of the hand counts together and then dividing the amount for each type of hand by the total.

Assume for a second there is a game with a deck of 7 cards, and each player gets 2 cards. The cards are a 2, 2, 4, 4, 6, 6 and 8. The hand ranks are that you either have a high card or you have a pair.

There are (7 - 5)! / 2 = 21 total combinations of cards. Three of the 21 combinations are pairs, so 18 of the hands are just high card hands. So in this game your chances of making a pair are about 3 / 21 ~ 14.29% and your chances of making a high card hand are 18 / 21 ~ 85.71%.