Poker fundamentals: the six ideas the rest is built on

In Texas Hold'em you make the best five-card hand out of your two cards and the five on the board. From strongest to weakest, the hands are:

1. Royal flush: ten to ace, all one suit.
2. Straight flush: five cards in a row, all one suit.
3. Four of a kind.
4. Full house: three of one rank and two of another.
5. Flush: five cards of one suit.
6. Straight: five cards in a row, mixed suits. The ace plays high or low, so A-2-3-4-5 is a straight and so is T-J-Q-K-A.
7. Three of a kind.
8. Two pair.
9. One pair.
10. High card.

When two players hold the same type of hand, the higher cards win. Two players with the same five cards split the pot. Suits never break a tie.

The dealer button moves one seat to the left after every hand. After the flop, the player on the button acts last, and the players in the blinds act first. Acting last is called being in position, and it is the single biggest structural edge in the game: you see what everyone else does before you have to decide.

At a six-handed table the seats, in the order they act before the flop, are under the gun, the hijack, the cutoff, the button, the small blind and the big blind. The later your seat, the more hands you can play, because fewer players are left to act behind you and you will have position after the flop. A hand like K-J is a fold under the gun and a raise on the button, and nothing about the cards changed.

Pot odds compare what you have to pay with what you can win. The pot is $80 and your opponent bets $20, so the pot is now $100 and it costs you $20 to see the next card. You are paying $20 to win $120 in total, which is 20 divided by 120, or about 17%. If your hand wins more often than 17% of the time, the call makes money in the long run.

You find your own chance from your outs, the cards that complete your hand. A flush draw on the flop has nine outs out of 47 unseen cards. The chance of hitting by the river, with two cards to come, is about 35%. On the turn, with one card to come, it is nine out of 46, about 20%. The quick way at the table is the rule of four and two: multiply your outs by four on the flop and by two on the turn to get a rough percentage.

The pot odds calculator does this for any pot, bet and number of outs.

Expected value, or EV, is what a decision earns on average if you could make it a thousand times. Take the flush draw above: you call $20 with a 35% chance of winning the $100 that is already in the pot. Thirty-five times in a hundred you win $100, and sixty-five times you lose $20. That is 35 minus 13, so the call is worth about $22 on average, even though you will miss the flush almost two times in three.

This is why the result of one hand tells you almost nothing about whether you played it well. A good call loses often. A bad call sometimes wins. Judge the decision, not the outcome.

Your bankroll is money set aside for poker only. It has to be big enough that an ordinary losing stretch does not force you to stop or to move up in stakes to chase it back. A buy-in in a cash game means 100 big blinds, so at $0.05/$0.10 a buy-in is $10.

• Cash games: 30 to 50 buy-ins for the stake you play.
• Tournaments: 100 buy-ins or more, because most tournaments end with no money back.
• Move down a level when you drop to about 20 buy-ins for the stake you are playing.

The bankroll calculator turns a sum of money into a stake.

Variance is the swing in your results that has nothing to do with how well you play. It is larger than most new players expect. A player who wins 5 big blinds per 100 hands, which is a good rate, with an ordinary standard deviation of 80 big blinds per 100 hands, is still behind after 10,000 hands about one time in four. That is not a bad run. That is the normal spread of results for a winning player.

Knowing this changes two things. You keep a bankroll large enough to ride the swings, and you judge your game over tens of thousands of hands, not over a weekend. The variance calculator shows the spread for your own win rate.

The room takes a small share of each cash game pot, up to a cap, and a fee on top of each tournament buy-in. That is the rake, and over a month it is often larger than the difference between a winning and a losing player. Rakeback pays part of it back to you. Basepoker and WePlay pay 30% and 32%; the details are on the rakeback page.