In Texas hold'em, the cards placed by the dealer on the board is called community cards. The community cards are dealt in three phases, which namely is the flop, the turn and the river. This is not the case in all poker variations, but you will face this order in the most popular games, such as Texas hold'em and Omaha.
In Texas Hold'em, the first common cards dealt are the three cards known as the flop. Then we proceed to deal the Turn and the River, which are single cards. Is there any specific reason why we first. The best place to start improving your post flop results at the Texas holdem tables is to stop playing weak starting hands. Learn how to use your table position to increase your chances to win, fold less on the river, and bluff less after the flop and your results will also improve. About Arkadium's Texas Hold'em Similar to all of Arkadium's online casino games, playing Texas Hold'em online is a great way to practice your poker skills and enjoy the game with none of the risk! Texas Hold 'Em (also stylized Texas Holdem) is not only the most popular poker variant in the United States, but it's also the most common game in U. If they find it difficult to size their bets during the post-flop stage, this may work in your favor. In the pre-flop stage, it’ll end up biting you in the behind. Bet Sizing in the Post-Flop Stage of Texas Hold’em. Let’s take a look at what happens post-flop. If you raise in the pre-flop stage, a continuation bet is expected.
The first three community cards are dealt together and are called the flop, the next card is called the turn and the very last card is called the river. It can look something like this:
Flop: 3♠-A♠-7♣
Turn: K♥
River: J♦
These two last phases are also called streets (4th and 5th street, respectively) and there's betting rounds on every street. There's also a separation of before and after the flop: pre-flop and post-flop.
In other words, we can separate a hand in poker in four phases with following betting rounds. This will, of course, create some strategical circumstances. It's time to look into these.
Strategic approaches
Some players are very reluctant to fold their hands before all community cards have been revealed on the table. But staying in the hand and calling bets with mediocre holdings only because you want to see if your hand will improve or to be absolutely sure that the opponent has you beaten is very far from an optimal strategy.
There are certainly some cases when calling on several streets is the right approach, but only when the odds are positive.
In poker, we don't want negative odds and we don't want to be passive. Instead, we want to operate either before the flop or directly after it – this said in general, not as a strict rule.
The operating before the flop is primarily based on the strength of our hole cards. The benefits of patience are huge and a good player in poker is a disciplined one (this is probably true in all forms of gambling). This means that a great number of starting hands should be folded immediately. More about starting hands criteria is discussed in another article.
The action directly after the flop is critical. Here we must plan our actions for all the remaining betting rounds. The call-and-wait-and-see-approach is not good poker. Let's say we have a draw, in this case we must consider the odds and also the value (how big the pot is going to be) in making the hand.
If we need a card to make a straight, but there are two suited cards on the board that also has been paired, it is an immense risk that our hand will be beat by a flush or a full house even if we make the straight. Or, maybe we will be forced to lay down the straight in a later betting round facing a very big bet. This is an example of bad planning.
The best action in most cases is therefore 1) to fold directly or, 2) to make a bet or a raise. By betting or raising we get information from the opponent's response and, not the least, we get a chance of winning the pot right away. This is a solid way to play poker.
Strategical thinking on the turn
The turn is often more complicated when the flop. On the flop you can always try to win the pot with a c-bet and it will not be too costly in most cases. But on the turn, the pot is often bigger and you must more often think about stack commitment from you and your opponent.
If your bet was called on the flop, will you bet again? This can be a very hard decision with a marginal hand. If you bet again, you will lose more money against a better hand; but if you not bet, you will show weakness and your opponent could take over the initiative.
When acting on the turn, you should also think about what will happen on the river.
Strategical thinking on the river
No river, no fish.Amarillo Slim
One of the most important things on the river is to value bet or not. Many players that have been called both on the flop and the turn will act careful on the river and only check. This could be correct, but in many cases your opponents are calling with a marginal hand, for example an ace pair with a worse kicker and you will lose profit by not bet a third time.
It is important to understand though, that you should not bet in situations when your opponent most likely will only call with better hands than yours and otherwise fold.
Related articles:
Mathematics: Flushes & Straights : Simple Pot Odds : Implied Odds : Reverse Implied Odds
Watch SplitSuit's video on Flushes and Flush Draws for 8 hand histories involving strategy on playing flushes in Texas Hold'em.
You are on the flop with a pretty decent flush draw. You have two hearts in your hand and there are another two on the flop.
Unfortunately, some cool cat has made a bet, putting you in a tricky situation where you have to decide whether or not it is in your best interest to call to try and make the flush, or fold and save your money.
This is a prime example of where you are going to take advantage of 'pot odds' to work out whether or not it is worth making the call.
What are pot odds? What about flushes and straights?
Basically, just forget about the name if you haven't heard about it before, there's no need to let it throw you off. Just think of 'pot odds' as the method for finding out whether chasing after a draw (like a flush or straight) is going to be profitable. If you're on your toes, you might have already been able to guess that it is generally better to chase after a draw when the bet is small rather than large, but we'll get to that in a minute...
Pot odds will tell you whether or not to call certain sized bets to try and complete your flush or straight draw.
Why use pot odds?
Because it makes you money, of course.
If you always know whether the best option is to fold or call when you're stuck with a hand like a flush draw, you are going to be saving (and winning) yourself money in the long run. On top of that, pot odds are pretty simple to work out when you get the hang of it, so it will only take a split second to work out if you should call or fold the next time you're in a sticky drawing situation. How nice is that?
How to work out whether or not to call with a flush or straight draw.
Now, this is the meat of the article. But trust me on this one, the 'working-out' part is not as difficult as you might think, so give me a chance to explain it to you before you decide to knock it on the head. So here we go...
Essentially, there are two quick and easy parts to working out pot odds. The first is to work out how likely it is that you will make your flush or straight (or whatever the hell you are chasing after), and the second is to compare the size of the bet that you are facing with the size of the pot. Then we use a little bit of mathematical magic to figure out if we should make the call.
1] Find out how likely it is to complete your draw (e.g. completing a flush draw).
All we have to do for this part is work out how many cards we have not seen, and then figure out how many of these unknown cards could make our draw and how many could not.
We can then put these numbers together to get a pretty useful ratio. So, for example, if we have a diamond flush draw on the flop we can work out...
The maths.
There are 47 cards that we do not know about (52 minus the 2 cards we have and minus the 3 cards on the flop).
- 9 of these unknown cards could complete our flush (13 diamonds in total minus 2 diamonds in our hand and the 2 diamonds on the flop).
- The other 38 cards will not complete our flush (47 unknown cards, minus the helpful 9 cards results in 38 useless ones).
- This gives us a ratio of 38:9, or scaled down... roughly 4:1.
So, at the end of all that nonsense we came out with a ratio of 4:1. This result is a pretty cool ratio, as it tells us that for every 4 times we get a useless card and miss our draw, 1 time will we get a useful card (a diamond) and complete our flush. Now all we need to do is put this figure to good use by comparing it to a similar ratio regarding the size of the bet that we are facing.
After you get your head around working out how many cards will help you and how many won't, the only tricky part is shortening a ratio like 38:9 down to something more manageable like 4:1. However, after you get used to pot odds you will just remember that things like flush draws are around 4:1 odds. To be honest, you won't even need to do this step the majority of the time, because there are very few ratios that you need to remember, so you can pick them off the top of your head and move on to step 2.
2] Compare the size of the bet to the size of the pot.
The title pretty much says it all here. Use your skills from the last step to work out a ratio for the size of the bet in comparison to the size of the pot. Just put the total pot size (our opponent's bet + the original pot) first in the ratio, and the bet size second. Here are a few quick examples for you...
- $20 bet into a $100 pot = 120:20 = 6:1
- $0.25 bet creating a total pot size of $1 = 1:0.25 = 4:1
- $40 bet creating a total pot size of $100 = 100:40 = 2.5:1
That should be enough to give you an idea of how to do the second step. In the interest of this example, I am going to say that our opponent (with a $200 stack) has bet $20 in to a $80 pot, giving us odds of 5:1 ($100:$20). This is going to come in very handy in the next step.
Texas Holdem Flop River
This odds calculation step is very simple, and the only tricky part is getting the big ratios down into more manageable ones. However, this gets a lot easier after a bit of practice, so there's no need to give up just yet if you're not fluent when it comes to working with ratios after the first 5 seconds. Give yourself a chance!
To speed up your pot odds calculations during play, try using the handy (and free) SPOC program.
3] Compare these two ratios.
Now then, we know how likely it is that we are going to complete our draw, and we have worked out our odds from the pot (pot odds, get it? It's just like magic I know.). All we have to do now is put these two ratios side to side and compare them...
- 5:1 pot odds
- 4:1 odds of completing our draw on the next card
Texas Holdem Flop River And Fun
The pot odds in this case are bigger than the odds of completing our draw, which means that we will be making more money in the long run for every time we hit according to these odds. Therefore we should CALL because we will win enough to make up for the times that we miss and lose our money.
If that doesn't make total sense, then just stick to these hard and fast rules if it makes things easier:
If your pot odds are bigger than your chances of hitting - CALL
If your pot odds are smaller than your chances of hitting - FOLD
So just think of bigger being better when it comes to pot odds. Furthermore, if you can remember back to the start of the article when we had the idea that calling smaller bets is better, you will be able to work out that small bets give you bigger pot odds - makes sense right? It really comes together quite beautifully after you get your head around it.
What if there are two cards to come?
In this article I have shown you how to work out pot odds for the next card only. However, when you are on the flop there are actually 2 cards to come, so shouldn't you work out the odds for improving to make the best hand over the next 2 cards instead of 1?
No, actually.
Even if there are 2 cards to come (i.e. you're on the flop), you should still only work out the odds of improving your hand for the next card only.
The reason for this is that if you work using odds for improving over two cards, you need to assume that you won't be paying any more money on the turn to see the river. Seeing as you cannot be sure of this (it's quite unlikely in most cases), you should work out your pot odds for the turn and river individually. This will save you from paying more money than you should to complete your draw.
I discuss this important principle in a little more detail on my page about the rule of 2 and 4 for pot odds. It's also one of the mistakes poker players make when using odds.
Note: The only time you use odds for 2 cards to come combined is when your opponent in all-in on the flop. In almost every other case, you take it one card at a time.
Playing flush and straight draws overview.
I really tried hard to keep this article as short as possible, but then again I didn't want to make it vague and hazy so that you had no idea about what was going on. I'm hoping that after your first read-through that you will have a rough idea about how to work out when you should call or fold when on a flush or straight draw, but I am sure that it will take you another look over or two before it really starts to sink in. So I advise that you read over it again at least once.
The best way to get to grips with pot odds is to actually start working them out for yourself and trying them out in an actual game. It is all well and good reading about it and thinking that you know how to use them, but the true knowledge of pot odds comes from getting your hands dirty and putting your mind to work at the poker tables.
It honestly isn't that tough to use pot odds in your game, as it will take less than a session or two before you can use them comfortably during play. So trust me on this one, it is going to be well worth your while to spend a little time learning how to use pot odds, in return for always knowing whether to call or fold when you are on a draw. It will take a load off your mind and put more money in your pocket.
To help you out when it comes to your calculations, take a look at the article on simple pot odds. It should make it all a lot less daunting.
Go back to the sublime Texas Hold'em guide.
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