Poker Hand Chances Percentages

• Poker Hand Chances Percentages Calculator
• Poker Hand Chances Percentages Against
• Poker Hand Percentage Calculator
• Poker Hand Chances Calculator

1. Weighting hand ranges gives you more accurate information about your chances in different poker situations as long as you determine the hand combinations right. Like in almost every skill game in the world, the more complicated a theory is, the harder it is to execute and the more profitable it is when executed perfectly.
2. As a poker player, knowing poker hand odds and rankings is crucial to knowing where you.
3. Take, for example, the poker percentages of AK, one of the few extremely powerful hands in Texas Hold’em. Technically, it wins less than a middle pocket pair like 7-7. Aside from all-in heads-up tournament situations A-K is a much stronger hand in real-life scenarios because real-life hands aren’t random hands staying in to showdown.

Texas Holdem Heads-Up Preflop Odds. This table was created by enumerating through every possible board and opponent hole card combination for each of the 169 texas holdem preflop starting hands. A royal flush is essentially the best possible hand that you can get in poker, but it’s still just a straight flush. So the odds of being dealt a royal are exactly the same as being dealt any other straight flush. You just need to have two hole cards that can make a royal, i.e., anything between a 10 and an Ace.

It’s incredibly difficult to put your opponent on an exact hand. Therefore, most of the time, you have to think in terms of poker hand ranges. Even though you don’t have a specific idea of what cards are in your opponent’s hand, a hand range gives you something to work with.

Beginners may not have thought of this, but winning players make almost all their decisions based on poker hand ranges and knowing the different types of poker hands you might get is extremely important. Your every action changes an opponent’s idea of your hand range and vice-versa. You can have anything when cards are dealt but every fold, call or raise tells something about the range of hands you can have.

Most players fail to make the effort to figure out a hand range. However, every player who intends to be a long-term winner needs to know how to analyze and weight hand ranges.

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Poker Hand Combinations

How to use a poker range calculator? In order to be able to calculate a range of hands, the first thing you need to keep in mind is how many possible hand combinations there are for different types of hands:

So what does the table tell you?

• There are more variations of non-paired hands than pocket pairs.
  For example, if you think an opponent’s hand range is 44 and 87, it’s more likely for the opponent to have 87 (16 combinations) than 44 (six combinations).
• There are four combinations of suited non-paired hands and 12 combinations of off-suited non-paired hands. Knowing this makes it easier to calculate the likelihood of an opponent having a suited hand.

Using Hand Ranges in Poker

Here’s a scenario: you raise with AK-offsuit pre-flop and the opponent calls. You know the opponent calls in this situation 15% of the time. According to Equilab, here’s the top 15% of poker hands (although someone’s 15% can include different hands–for example, one might play 66 rather than KT-offsuit):

You have AK-offsuit, and you’d like to figure out how your hand matches up against the opponent’s hand range. So you use Equilab to calculate it and you see that AK-offsuit has 61.36% equity while the opponent has 38.64%. Sounds like a good deal for you.

Most players assume they’d do well but they have never thought their opponent’s hand range through and evaluated it against their own hand. Once you get the habit of using an equity calculator, you’ll be surprised by how much or little equity certain hands have against certain hand ranges.

Your idea of an opponent’s hand range changes with every decision the opponent makes. So let’s say, instead of calling your raise, the opponent decides to raise, which he does 3.75% of the time. Here’s the hand range:

Based on the opponent’s hand range, he’d now have ~57% equity. When he just calls, you’re still ahead of his hand range; when he re-raises, your AK-offsuit is in trouble.

Weighted Hand Ranges

But an opponent may play certain hands out of his hand range more often than others. For example, instead of re-raising 100% of the time with 99, he may only do so 50% of the time. Based on your reads, you assign more or less weight to a certain hand in a range of hands and, just like before, calculate how your hand does against it.

And it can make a big difference. For example, an opponent’s hand range is AA and QQ while you have KK. In case the opponent plays both AA and QQ 100% of the time in that situation, you might consider your chances of winning poker around 50%, but if the opponent plays AA 100% of the time and only plays QQ some other % of the time, your chances of winning take a hit. You’d be going against AA the majority of the time.

How to Calculate a Weighted Hand Range

So let’s say you have JJ pre-flop and you’re up against an all-in raise. You think the opponent could do this with AA, KK, QQ, AK, and AQ. How many hand combinations do you beat and how many beat you?

Hand combinations that beat you:

Poker Hand Chances Percentages Calculator

Hand combinations that you beat:

You beat 32 of your opponent’s hand combinations and the opponent beats you with 18 combinations. By using Equilab, we can see that your equity is 42.60%. If, however, the opponent only has AK and AQ 50% of the time (which is a relatively realistic scenario), here’s what happens:

Hand combinations that beat you v2:

Hand combinations that you beat v2:

And by using Equilab, we can see that our equity drops to about 36%. That’s a dramatic difference in the long run. which can make the difference between whether you should call or fold, which obviously depends on pot and bet sizes and how much money you and your opponent have left.

Learning to weight poker hand ranges is worth your while. Weighting hand ranges gives you more accurate information about your chances in different poker situations as long as you determine the hand combinations right. Like in almost every skill game in the world, the more complicated a theory is, the harder it is to execute and the more profitable it is when executed perfectly. With a little bit of work and thinking you’ll get more accurate calculations.

How to Manipulate Hand Ranges

The basic idea of manipulating hand ranges is To make strong hands look weak and the other way around. This way we can get the most out of our hands because either the opponent likes to call when we’ve got a tight range of hands – meaning we can get the money in with a strong hand – or the opponent likes to fold when we’ve got a loose range, meaning we can get the opponent to fold when we have a weak hand.

One of the biggest problems is to recognize what strong and weak play is in an opponent’s opinion. Obviously Lisa and Bart are going to read situations differently and they’re going to end up having different ideas of who’s weak and who isn’t. Another problem is to know who’s been paying attention to the game and who has other things to focus on. You have to rely on the idea that the opponent follows the game at least semi-closely and adjusts his play optimally against your range of hands. Usually it’s easy to tell who’s following the game, though.

The third problem would be to understand how an opponent reacts to the way you play. There are different ways for players to react, obviously, since otherwise all the players would play the same way. Some make logical decisions, some don’t.

All of these points must be taken into consideration when manipulating hand ranges in poker. It’s of no use to build an image for yourself if the opponent pays no attention to the game. It might be counterproductive to build an image if the opponent reacts unlike you expected. You’ll always have to consider these points when building a player image and manipulating your range.

Common Mistakes – Being Optimistic

The biggest mistake when figuring out a hand range is to have too much optimism when making decisions. For example, always believing the best and creating hand ranges that are convenient for you is a huge mistake and misses the whole idea. It’s not just about winning; it’s also about losing the least possible. By realizing your hand range is unprofitable against an opponent’s hand range, you avoid losing money.

Giving Up

Losing is a part of poker and beating most of an opponent’s range doesn’t mean you’ll win all of the pots. You’ll lose a certain percentage of them, and you may even have an extremely unlikely run of losses but such is variance.

Other strategies

If you are looking for different strategies go ahead and visit our main page.

This post works with 5-card Poker hands drawn from a standard deck of 52 cards. The discussion is mostly mathematical, using the Poker hands to illustrate counting techniques and calculation of probabilities

Working with poker hands is an excellent way to illustrate the counting techniques covered previously in this blog – multiplication principle, permutation and combination (also covered here). There are 2,598,960 many possible 5-card Poker hands. Thus the probability of obtaining any one specific hand is 1 in 2,598,960 (roughly 1 in 2.6 million). The probability of obtaining a given type of hands (e.g. three of a kind) is the number of possible hands for that type over 2,598,960. Thus this is primarily a counting exercise.

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Preliminary Calculation

Usually the order in which the cards are dealt is not important (except in the case of stud poker). Thus the following three examples point to the same poker hand. The only difference is the order in which the cards are dealt.

These are the same hand. Order is not important.

The number of possible 5-card poker hands would then be the same as the number of 5-element subsets of 52 objects. The following is the total number of 5-card poker hands drawn from a standard deck of 52 cards.

The notation is called the binomial coefficient and is pronounced “n choose r”, which is identical to the number of -element subsets of a set with objects. Other notations for are , and . Many calculators have a function for . Of course the calculation can also be done by definition by first calculating factorials.

Thus the probability of obtaining a specific hand (say, 2, 6, 10, K, A, all diamond) would be 1 in 2,598,960. If 5 cards are randomly drawn, what is the probability of getting a 5-card hand consisting of all diamond cards? It is

This is definitely a very rare event (less than 0.05% chance of happening). The numerator 1,287 is the number of hands consisting of all diamond cards, which is obtained by the following calculation.

The reasoning for the above calculation is that to draw a 5-card hand consisting of all diamond, we are drawing 5 cards from the 13 diamond cards and drawing zero cards from the other 39 cards. Since (there is only one way to draw nothing), is the number of hands with all diamonds.

If 5 cards are randomly drawn, what is the probability of getting a 5-card hand consisting of cards in one suit? The probability of getting all 5 cards in another suit (say heart) would also be 1287/2598960. So we have the following derivation.

Thus getting a hand with all cards in one suit is 4 times more likely than getting one with all diamond, but is still a rare event (with about a 0.2% chance of happening). Some of the higher ranked poker hands are in one suit but with additional strict requirements. They will be further discussed below.

Another example. What is the probability of obtaining a hand that has 3 diamonds and 2 hearts? The answer is 22308/2598960 = 0.008583433. The number of “3 diamond, 2 heart” hands is calculated as follows:

One theme that emerges is that the multiplication principle is behind the numerator of a poker hand probability. For example, we can think of the process to get a 5-card hand with 3 diamonds and 2 hearts in three steps. The first is to draw 3 cards from the 13 diamond cards, the second is to draw 2 cards from the 13 heart cards, and the third is to draw zero from the remaining 26 cards. The third step can be omitted since the number of ways of choosing zero is 1. In any case, the number of possible ways to carry out that 2-step (or 3-step) process is to multiply all the possibilities together.

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The Poker Hands

Here’s a ranking chart of the Poker hands.

The chart lists the rankings with an example for each ranking. The examples are a good reminder of the definitions. The highest ranking of them all is the royal flush, which consists of 5 consecutive cards in one suit with the highest card being Ace. There is only one such hand in each suit. Thus the chance for getting a royal flush is 4 in 2,598,960.

Royal flush is a specific example of a straight flush, which consists of 5 consecutive cards in one suit. There are 10 such hands in one suit. So there are 40 hands for straight flush in total. A flush is a hand with 5 cards in the same suit but not in consecutive order (or not in sequence). Thus the requirement for flush is considerably more relaxed than a straight flush. A straight is like a straight flush in that the 5 cards are in sequence but the 5 cards in a straight are not of the same suit. For a more in depth discussion on Poker hands, see the Wikipedia entry on Poker hands.

The counting for some of these hands is done in the next section. The definition of the hands can be inferred from the above chart. For the sake of completeness, the following table lists out the definition.

Definitions of Poker Hands

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Counting Poker Hands

Straight Flush
Counting from A-K-Q-J-10, K-Q-J-10-9, Q-J-10-9-8, …, 6-5-4-3-2 to 5-4-3-2-A, there are 10 hands that are in sequence in a given suit. So there are 40 straight flush hands all together.

Four of a Kind
There is only one way to have a four of a kind for a given rank. The fifth card can be any one of the remaining 48 cards. Thus there are 48 possibilities of a four of a kind in one rank. Thus there are 13 x 48 = 624 many four of a kind in total.

Full House
Let’s fix two ranks, say 2 and 8. How many ways can we have three of 2 and two of 8? We are choosing 3 cards out of the four 2’s and choosing 2 cards out of the four 8’s. That would be = 4 x 6 = 24. But the two ranks can be other ranks too. How many ways can we pick two ranks out of 13? That would be 13 x 12 = 156. So the total number of possibilities for Full House is

Note that the multiplication principle is at work here. When we pick two ranks, the number of ways is 13 x 12 = 156. Why did we not use = 78?

Flush
There are = 1,287 possible hands with all cards in the same suit. Recall that there are only 10 straight flush on a given suit. Thus of all the 5-card hands with all cards in a given suit, there are 1,287-10 = 1,277 hands that are not straight flush. Thus the total number of flush hands is 4 x 1277 = 5,108.

Straight
There are 10 five-consecutive sequences in 13 cards (as shown in the explanation for straight flush in this section). In each such sequence, there are 4 choices for each card (one for each suit). Thus the number of 5-card hands with 5 cards in sequence is . Then we need to subtract the number of straight flushes (40) from this number. Thus the number of straight is 10240 – 10 = 10,200.

Three of a Kind
There are 13 ranks (from A, K, …, to 2). We choose one of them to have 3 cards in that rank and two other ranks to have one card in each of those ranks. The following derivation reflects all the choosing in this process.

Two Pair and One Pair
These two are left as exercises.

Poker Hand Chances Percentages Against

High Card
The count is the complement that makes up 2,598,960.

The following table gives the counts of all the poker hands. The probability is the fraction of the 2,598,960 hands that meet the requirement of the type of hands in question. Note that royal flush is not listed. This is because it is included in the count for straight flush. Royal flush is omitted so that he counts add up to 2,598,960.

Probabilities of Poker Hands

Poker Hand Percentage Calculator

Poker Hand Chances Calculator

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2017 – Dan Ma