The Game that is Sweeping the Land
June 17, 2005
So what is this game that is taking the world by storm? Texas Holdum is name, hours of fun is the game. Texas holdum is so popular right now that some people don't even realize that texas holdum is poker. There are people out there that have never played poker and are taking up texas holdum not realizing that they are related.
If you didn't get lucky and get your ten on the turn, let's see what your chances are of you getting your ten on the river. There are still 2 tens remaining, but now there is one card less in the Texas Holdum deck so that leaves us with 46 cards. We know that the answer is 2/46 and that is .0434, which is also close to 4.3%. Your chances of getting the ten on the turn did not change much from your chances of getting the ten on the turn.
Let's see what your chances were of hitting a ten on the flop. Let's first figure out the chances of not getting a ten on each successive holdem flip. On the first card there is a 48/50 chance (48 non-ten cards left, 50 cards left in the deck), the second card gives us 47/49 and the third card leaves you with 46/48. These figures come out to .96, .959, and .958. The next step would be to multiply those three numbers and you get .882, or an 88.2% chance of not getting any tens on the flop. Therefore, this means you would have an 11.8% chance of getting a ten on the flop.
This gives you some insight on "how odds can help you when you are playing" and it will make your decisions on whether or not to go for it. Let's take a look at our second example.
Now we are going to look at the chances you have of hitting a straight draw. The pokerparty dealer distributes your cards and you receive a 9?8?. Now you see the flop and it arrives with a 10?4?7?. As a result of the flop you now have a straight draw.
First off we will look at finding out what your chances are of hitting your poker straight on the turn card. We know that a Jack or a six will complete your drawing hand. We can also assume that there are four of each left in the deck since we do not know what cards your texas holdum opponents have. With that information in front of you, we can now figure out that you have 8 possible outs. We have figured out that the chance of getting one of your needed cards on the turn is 8/47, because there 8 outs and there are 47 cards remaining in the deck. This will leave you with a 17% (.170) chance of finishing off your straight on the turn.
Okay, assuming we did not get the needed card on the turn, we will now figure out what our "chances now are of getting the much needed texas holdum card." We know that there are still 8 cards remaining in the poker deck that can potentially help out our hand, and there are now a total of 46 cards left in the deck. That leaves us with 8/46. Our chance of getting this card has improved to 17.4% (.174), which is obviously not a big change from the turn card.
Let's now take a look at what the odds would have been if we tried to figure out our chances of getting one of our needed texas holdum cards on the turn or river. First off, we will begin by calculating the chances of not getting a Jack or a six, so we can do it like the way we did in our first example (which would be, {39/47} X {38/46}). Also, since we have already figured out our chances in the previous scenarios, we will just invert the probabilities and multiply them. On the turn we figured out that there was a .170 chance, and the river gave us a chance of .174. To invert the probabilities we will subtract the numbers from one (which looks like this, 1 - .170 and 1 - .174). Now we are left with .830 and .826. We will now multiply these numbers and we get .686. This number is our chance of NOT hitting our card at all. So to figure out our chances of hitting our much needed card we invert this number (1 - .686) and we get .314, or 31.4%.
Those are two examples of how to try and figure out your chances of hitting your cards at the opportune time. If you are interested in finding out the odds from a percentage all you have to do is follow this formula:
