Playing the Flop - PokerTraining.org

Playing the Flop
Evaluating your hand - part 1/2

Your hand

The first thing you have to assess is how the flop affected your very own situation. Let´s assume that you don´t hold a pocket-pair, meaning you definitely need some help from the flop. Considering this scenario, there are three different situations you may find yourself in. First, you might have hit at least a pair. Having top-pair accompanied by a solid kicker is always something to build on. The higher the pair and/or the kicker, the higher are your chances to win the pot. Hitting the middle-pair on the flop might still be enough to stay in the pot when the circumstances seem to work in your favor but I´d only check/fold with anything less.

Of course, hitting the top-pair is far from being a guarantee of winning the pot since there are way too many other hands that might beat you. However when you take a quick peek at our “Flop probabilities”-chart, you´ll see that you won´t see two-pairs, three of a kinds or straights on the flop very often.

On the flipside, completing two-pair, a set or an even better hand gives you a huge advantage and very high probabilities of being way ahead of your opposition.

The second situation occurs when you didn´t hit anything but you´re actually drawing to a specific hand. Maybe you hold two suited whole-cards and you´re drawing to a flush. Perhaps you have an open-ended straight-draw or at least two over-cards. All things considered, you need additional help on turn and/or river. In case you´re facing such circumstances, you have to start counting your potential outs, calculating your chances of still winning the pot and putting that number into perspective when facing another player´s bet (for more specific information about odds, outs and probabilities, please check our article and take a look at the chart we prepared).

The third and final possibility happens when you not only didn´t hit at least a pair, but also missed out on any potential draw and don´t have an over-card to show for. One example for such a hand would be if you decided to take a look at the flop with a hand like 87s and the flop shows K Q J. With such a hand, you´re certainly way behind and you shouldn´t invest any more chips or money during that hand.

Now let´s turn our focus to the scenario of you holding a pocket-pair. A hand like JJ or TT looks really strong during pre-flop situations since the only other hands that dominate you are higher pairs like QQ, KK or AA. But as I mentioned during the beginning of this text, the three cards on the flop are capable of turning things upside down. When you´re holding a pocket-pair, the main aspect you have to be concerned with is the number of over-cards you´re seeing. Assuming you hold a pair of tens, then every jack, queen, king and ace qualifies as a scare-card to you because if one of your opponents holds one of those over-cards himself and stays in the pot, your chances of winning the pot go down to below 10 %. Please take a look at our “Flop probabilities”-chart: When you hold TT, there´s a 69.5 % chance of seeing at least one over-card on the flop. Now if you continue to check out the chart, you realize that the probability of seeing at least one over-card increases when the “value” of your pocket-pair decreases:

The smaller the pocket-pair, the higher the chances to see a flop containing at least one over-card.

For instance, if you hold 66, your chances of seeing an over-card on the flop climb to almost 96 % or 19 out of 20 flops. Continuing to play such a hand when being confronted with multiple opponents and over-cards on the board is extremely difficult since you must assume that you´re already beaten when somebody starts to bet. Because of that, when holding a low pocket-pair, your goal has to be to hit at least a set on the flop in order to stay in the pot.

A lot of rookies make the mistake of staying with their low pocket-pair even if they didn´t hit a set despite multiple opponents and over-cards, thereby wasting away too much of their stack.

The scenario looks a little bit different when you have a high pair like JJ or QQ. With a pair of jacks, there are three cards you definitely don´t want to see on the flop: A queen, a king and an ace. If the flop only shows one over-card, preferably not an ace, there´s still a chance that you´re not yet beaten, especially if you raised your hand before the flop and only have one or two opponents to play against. But if you see a flop like A K 5 and your two opponents bet and raise, you have to assume that you´re already way behind with your pair of jacks.

Read part 2/2