What's the trick to figuring out poker combos?
I've watched some videos. I've read some articles. But I still don't know how to figure this stuff out in real time while I'm at the table or playing online and possibly many tables. Is there a trick?
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I've watched some videos. I've read some articles. But I still don't know how to figure this stuff out in real time while I'm at the table or playing online and possibly many tables. Is there a trick?
I've been using https://flopsy.io to learn. It's a tool focused on teaching you how quickly calculate possible/blocked combos in villain's range.
How can I figure it out while at the table, just on the fly?
Like if I have KQo on a Qs9s3c flop and get check-raised or check-called, how can I think here in terms of poker combos to help me if I have less than 30 seconds to act?
For any given hand in villains range you would have to calculate the combos seperately. However we can take shortcuts - if you have QJ and QT for instance we recognize that there are the same number of combos for both. In this example we can split into categories:
Pocket pairs, no set and not KK - 6 combos. This is a standard result that you should know. If no cards are known, there are 6 combos for each PP. If we artificially call our cards “card 1” and “card 2”, we could have any of 4 aces for card 1 and any of the remaining 3 for card 2. 4x3=12, but remember we are counting each combo twice this way (we count AhAc different than AcAh since we artificially ordered our cards.) We must therefore divide by 2 to get the correct answer of 6.
We can work out other hands the same way. For KK for instance, if villain has that he can have one of 3 Ks as card 1 and 2 choices for card 2 (since we have a K) That computes to 3 combos. Same holds for 99 and 33.
Qx where x is not in our hand or on the board - we do this just a bit differently. He can have either of the 2 Qs plus any of the 4 other cards. We multiply these and get the actual number of combos - no dividing by two since we didn’t artificially order the cards. So there are 8 combos of each Qx where x is a card we don’t see- AQ, QJ, QT, etc
Finally we have Qx where x is a card we do see. KQ, for example. Same procedure as the last one except we know there are only 3 of the other card. So we add 6 combos for KQ, Q9, and Q3.
