An Introduction tothe Mathematics of Poker

Courtesy of Counting the Odds [http://countingtheodds.com]

Math in Poker

Most poker players will tell you that poker is not gambling. In a sense, that is true, it’s a game of skill.But in every hand you play, there is still a certain amount of luck involved – whether you hit thecards you want, etc. in a specific hand.So where does the skill come in? The skill is in knowing how to make the most of each situation. Ahuge aspect of that (in addition to other factors like hand reading) is about knowing how much luckyou need – how likely you are to hit your hand – and how much to bet according to that. In short, it’sabout maximising your expected value.

Expected Value

You’ll see that term, “

Expected Value

” (or

for short) a lot in any books dealing with poker theory(and you’ll see it

a lot

in my blog as well). What does it mean?The technical definition is that EV is “the long-run average value of the variable over manyindependent repetitions of an experiment”. Ok, what does it mean in normal English? I think it’s bestillustrated with an example.Let’s say you’re in a Texas Hold’em hand, with just the river to go. Now, imagine that you can dealthe river over and over again, forever; you deal a card, then put it back in the deck, reshuffle, anddeal again. Your EV is how much you’d win on average per hand.Let’s take a look at a simpler example, of flipping a coin. Imagine we flip a coin, and bet on the coinflip. If it’s heads, I pay you $2; if it’s tails, you pay me $1.If I’m not cheating, half the flips will be heads, and half will be tails, in the long run. If we flipped it ahundred times, you’d expect 50 heads and 50 tails. You would win $2 each on the 50 heads, for$100, and lose $1 each on the 50 tails, for a loss of $50 – giving you a final profit of $50.On average, you’d make $1 every 2 flips, or $0.50 a flip. So your expected value from that coin flip is$0.50. This means that you should definitely take the bet, because on average, you win money onevery flip.Simply put, if the EV is more than 0, then the bet will be profitable in the long run.

Outs

How does that apply in poker? The simplest calculations for poker are when it’s heads up and oneplayer is all in. So let’s take a look at a sample hand.Your hand: Flop:

Your opponent bets, and you put him on a K. That means you’re behind at the moment, and youneed to hit your flush to win the hand.How many cards would improve your hand to a flush? Any of the following:That gives a total of 9 possible cards which would give you your flush. This is commonly referred toas 9 outs.

How Likely You Are to Hit Your Outs

Ok, so you have 9 outs. But that doesn’t really help unless you know how likely you are to hit on of those 9 outs.What are the chances of the turn card being one of those 9? There are 52 total cards in the deck.you know 5 cards at the moment (the 2 in your hand, and the 3 on the flop), leaving 47 unknowncards. So there’s a 9 out of 47 = 9/47 = 19.15% chance that you’ll hit one of your outs on the turn. Bythe same reasoning, there’s a 9 out of 46 = 19.57% chance that it’ll hit on the river.If you’re on the flop, you then have a total of 19.15 + 19.57 = 38.71% chance of hitting one of yourouts by the river.A summary of the number of outs you have and the corresponding probabilities are in the tablebelow.No of Outs Chance of Hitting onTurnChance of Hitting onRiverChance of Improvingon Either Turn + River1 2.13% 2.17% 4.30%2 4.26% 4.35% 8.60%3 6.38% 6.52% 12.90%4 8.51% 8.50% 17.21%5 10.64% 10.87 21.51%6 12.77% 13.04% 25.81%7 14.89% 15.22% 30.11%8 17.02% 17.39 34.41%9 19.15% 19.57% 38.71%10 21.28% 21.74% 43.02%11 23.40% 23.91% 47.32%