Poker Preflop Odds

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Poker Preflop Odds Heads Up
Texas Holdem Odds And Probabilities
Pre Flop Odds Calc

While technology may have come a long way, learning by using pen and paper never goes out of style. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea but, personally, I find this approach very effective as I tend to better be able to commit things to memory when doing things this way.

For a poker player, learning and understanding math behind the game is essential. Pretty much without exception, you can’t be good at poker if you don’t understand poker math, plain and simple.

There are many ways to go about learning these numbers but if the aforementioned approach appeals to you, then you’re going to love the Poker Workbook by James “SplitSuit” Sweeney. It is an extensive source of knowledge on poker math and percentages that requires your active involvement. It may feel like you’re back in school at times, but if you do it right you’re bound to learn a lot from these materials.

Omaha Holdem Odds Calculator. Omaha Hi/Lo Odds Calculator. Holdem Preflop Odds. These tables are computed by simulating or enumerating millions or billions of hands to give some useful numbers for playing poker. Texas Holdem 10 Player Preflop Odds. Texas Holdem Heads-Up Preflop Odds. Texas Holdem Preflop Nut Odds. Omaha Hi Lo Preflop Odds. Pot odds in poker simply means the “price” that it costs you to continue with your hand. For example, if you’re in a hand where the pot is $100 and your opponent bets $50, you’re getting 3 to 1 pot odds to.

Poker Workbook in a Nutshell

So, what exactly is the Poker Workbook? It is a poker textbook containing more than 1,500 tasks involving poker math – from the simplest calculations to highly elaborate concepts. Every single aspect of the workbook is briefly explained and then followed by a number of calculations you’ll need to do on your own.

Concepts covered in the Poker Workbook include:

Equity & EV
Ranges & range building
Pot odds & Implied Odds
Open raising
3-bets & 4-bets
Preflop all-ins
Blockers
… and more

Once you get the basic grasp of the concept that’s being discussed, you’ll need to apply that knowledge to real examples and come up with exact answers. You’ll need to calculate percentages, number of combos, pot odds, and more, and then fill in the answers. So, it’s not the kind of book that you can just read. It only works if you actually take time to do the exercises!

Train Your Brain to Think Poker

The main goal of the Poker Workbook is to teach you how to quickly make all sorts of calculations while playing. Although our brains aren’t computers and most of us can’t do complex calculations in seconds, almost everyone can develop a skillset to make very good approximations. More often than not, this is all you will need at the poker tables.

To tackle tasks in the workbook, you’ll need poker software such as Flopzilla and/or Equilab. These programs will let you build custom ranges and turn percentages into visual representations (and vice-versa) of hand ranges.

As you do this, you should become much better at visualizing what a certain percentage of hands looks like. You should also learn how to quickly figure out if a particular call is +EV or not based on how it relates to the pot and the strength of your own hand.

It all may seem abstract until you actually sit down and start doing it. That’s exactly why I like SplitSuit’s approach with this product. It forces you to sit down, think about, and physically write down your results. That way, you can’t fool yourself into thinking you were “close enough”. If the number is there and it’s off by a lot (or even a little), you’ll know you made a mistake in your calculations somewhere.

Poker Preflop Odds Heads Up

When you want to check your results, there is the separate Answer Key file, which allows you to quickly find answers for particular questions without having to go back and forth through the original book. This is really helpful as it saves time and lets you focus more on the learning process.

Slow but Efficient

The Poker Workbook was designed to be studied methodically. SplitSuit recommends doing a few pages every day and really focusing on getting the right answers, so this is probably the best way to go about it. If you’re already an experienced player, some of the earlier tasks will be easy to complete off the top of your head. If you’re new to poker math, though, it will take some time.

The good thing about the workbook is that you can organize your studying time so it doesn’t affect your other poker learning activities, such as watching videos or analyzing your hands. You can just do a few exercises whenever you feel like it. As you do more, you’re bound to become better at it.

Finally, there’s the price point: just $39. That’s affordable for pretty much any poker player. Moreover, when you consider it as an “investment” rather than a “money spend”, it’s tough to argue that you aren’t getting great bang for your buck.

So, to summarize, it may feel like “doing things the old fashioned way, with pen and paper” is a step back when compared to all the modern and interactive poker training systems out there but I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. The more traditional approach to learning poker can still work very well and the fact you’re more involved with the materials will help you memorize much more information even if you don’t realize it at first.

If you want to learn poker math from scratch or if there are certain concepts that you don’t quite understand or struggle with, give Poker Workbook a go. Odds are you’re going to love it once you get into it and begin a daily poker study routine.

Texas Holdem Odds And Probabilities

Pocket aces win 85% of the time against one opponent holding the random hand in Texas Holdem. Although the percentage varies greatly depending on the opponent’s hand and the number of opponents. 85% is the odds to win when AA goes all-in preflop. Odds change on later streets.

It might feel unfair when we loose holding the best hand but keep in mind if we are not 100% to win, we will lose sometimes.

Table of Contents

Chances of winning with pocket aces preflop

Firstly let’s look at odds of winning with AA preflop. For better representation, I will take a sample of 100 examples. So next 100 times you receive an AA, 15 times you will lose and win 85 times.

We should not forget about variance. If we experience negative variance (if we are unlucky), then we may lose 30 times and win 70 times only. On the other hand, if we get a positive side of variance (if we are lucky), we could win 95 out of 100 times!

Odds for winning when all-in preflop change depending on which hand we are up against. See how well does AA against specific hands. For new players to poker, let me elaborate on the table below.

72o means any combination of 7 and 2, o after means the hand is off-suit (meaning that suits on 7 and 2 don’t match)
22+ means any pocket pair of 2 and higher (which is all pocket pairs from 22 to and including AA)
T+ means any card T and higher (T, J, Q, K, A)
JTs stands for JT suites, which means that suits of J and T match
broadway hands are the hands that include any combination of hands where the lowest card is T or higher (TQ, TJ, AA, KK, TT, AT)

How odds change against more players

The odds of winning reduce if more players are involved in the hand. Against two opponents holding random hands, AA wins 73.5% of the time. Against three, the odds of winning are now merely 64%.

The tool I am using to show you the % is called Equilab. And you can download it for free from Pokerstrategy’s website. Click on Poker Tools in the menu, the software and scroll down to the end where it says Free training software. Make sure you download the one for Hold’em (it’s written only Equilab).

Chances of winning with AA on later streets

In poker, there is more than just preflop. We know four streets. Those are preflop, flop, turn, and river. It’s easy to calculate your odds to win preflop. When it comes to postflop, things start to get more complex. There are many possible flops. In fact 22100 possible flops. Now some of those could be grouped, but that would still leave us with 1755 different scenarios of flops. On turn and river, that number only increases.

So I can’t show you the odds of winning with AA against those. But I encourage you to download yourself Equilab I linked to above and play around with different flops, turns, and rivers. As a general rule of thumb, more players, the more cautious you need to be. It will be more likely at least one player has something good.

Chances of winning pre-flop with other hands

Pocket aces are the strongest hand in poker. But we shouldn’t ignore others. The second strongest hand in Hold’em are pocket kings followed by pocket queens.

Chances to win with pocket kings

From the table, we can notice that equity (% to win) with KK against random hand preflop is a bit different for some cards and pretty much the same for others. The biggest difference comes from broadway hands and 22+. The difference is because 22+ and broadways also include AA and that crushes us (AA is 82% to win against KK).

KK has 78.5% chance to win preflop against a random hand. So if our opponent holds a random hand they will still win roughly 1 out of five times. 21.5% of the time to be exact.

Important note. In scenarios above for AA and KK, where I compared them to random holding, I assumed the opponent has a random hand he is willing to go all-in with preflop. In real poker games, opponents will not be going all-in with random hands.

Lets now check the case for QQ

Same as for KK our equity with QQ now falls lower, when we are up against broadway hands and pocket pairs.

Lastly let’s check how we do against those hands with AK as many players like to overplay AK.

Many beginner players are shocked when they see how poorly AK does. That’swhere seasoned poker players will make a lot of money from beginners. Any experienced player knows newbie often overplays hands that look nice but don’t do that good against stronger holdings. With QQ our equity was a lot higher for all of the scenarios. Even against the worst combination of 72o, AK is supposed to win only 2 out of 3 times. This means you will lose 32 times and win 62 times. And that is if you run just average. And this if there would be no variance involved.

I will go deeper into the strategy in another article as it is a massive topic on its own. For now, know when the opponent goes all-in preflop, he will have a decent hand unless they are aggressive players willing to bluff their stack. While some players play tighter (they don’t play many hands) than others a good rule of thumb is pocket kings and aces are always strong enough to get all the money in the middle preflop. With QQ we should be good against the majority, but the tightest people. When it comes to AK, it depends on the opponent we are up against. Often it comes down to personal playing style. I prefer to play my AK a bit more passively, and I will not be blindly throwing my stack in the middle to gamble for what is around 50% to win against what opponent wants to go with all-in.

Conclusion

While pocket aces are a definite favorite against any other hand preflop, it doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed to win. Odds change significantly if more players are involved, but at the end of the day, if we get all the money in preflop, we should be happy. In the worst-case scenario, we will have 77.5% to win. When we have either KK or QQ we should still do good. But with AK we need to start being cautiouspreflop.

Pre Flop Odds Calc

Ace King vs Pocket Jacks: Winrate and Examples
Odds of Winning With Pocket Kings: Including the Winrate
Chances to Win with QQ: Graph Included

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