Every poker player is familiar with poker hands and how they are played. In the game of Texas Hold ’em, starting hands consist of two hole cards, that belong only to yourself and stay hidden from your opponent’s. Five regular community cards also are dealt to the table.
After the five regular cards are dealt, betting starts, and the first player may call, raise or fold. If the flush is held, that means there is another community card to follow it, called the joker. So, if you have a straight, full house, or flush, you are ahead in hands. Poker hands for this type of Texas Hold ’em include flush, straight, three of a kind, four of a kind, full house, flush, straight, three of a kind, or four of a kind.
Two of a kind poker hands consist of a straight and a flush. No single card may belong to more than one pair in a pair. In a two pair game, the person with the straight flush has the advantage, compared to the one with a straight but no flush, or vice versa. This is because in a two pair game, if you lose the flush, you are out of the pot. However, the advantage goes to the player with the straight flush, because it is usually hard to beat a player with a pair of a kind.
Undetermined is a special category of unusual poker hands. These are poker hands where a player does not know whether the cards were dealt in a certain order. For instance, it is possible to have a straight and a flush in a single pair — unlikely poker hands from his range based on previous transactions.
On the other hand, in an official poker hands ranking chart, you can see that a certain card is rarer than the others. It is rarer because it is most likely to be a blower. A straight and a flush are much rarer in an official ranking chart than it is online. Blowers are much more common online than they are offline.
In addition to being rarer, some pairs are simply harder to play than others. In poker hands ranking charts, the ranks to indicate the hands that a professional player might try. For example, Royal Flush is ranked as the seventh hardest poker hand for a player to handle. Royal flush is so hard to hold because all the other four suits are easy to hold, so if a player has a pair of rouses in his or her first four hands, he or she has a great chance of hitting a royal flush. But a straight is the easiest royal flush to hold, so players with poor pairings will often try for a straight when they have a good hand, but will often miss.
So which player should you bet against if you are playing poker hands? If your opponents are all experts, then you would be safest betting against them, especially if they are good at poker hands ranking. But if you are going against a novice, then be wary of playing too aggressively. A novice poker hands player may be less likely to hit a premium hand. Even if the odds are low, you are still gambling with your money, so the best option is to play cautiously until you know what your opponent’s range is.
If you play poker hands by matching up their cards to their pot odds, then you will need to make the assumption that they are probably going to have the same range as you do. However, if you bet and you know that you have an excellent hand, but the opponents do not have an excellent hand, you will be better off to get out than to fold because of the increased hand size. If you have an excellent five-card hand and the opponent has an awful four-of-a-hand, then you have probably over-belted and will lose if you hit no-brains, no-clubs, or no-burns. On the other hand, if you have a bad five-card hand and the opponent has a great five-card hand, then you have likely under-bet and will win if you hit no-brains, no-clubs, or no-burns. The royal flush in poker hands is one of the more unusual combinations, but the combination of having a likely royal flush, a likely straight flush, and an excellent three of a kind are unlikely to occur very often, so it is unlikely to make you lose in the long run.
